Explain the perspective
called cultural
relativism.
What are the benefits of
relativism to social
science?
What are the benefits to
human relations?
What are the main subfields of
“holistic,” four-field
anthropology?
What is ethnocentrism?
What are the results of
extreme ethnocentrism?
Describe an extreme of
cultural relativism.
A couple of barbarians.
What is culture?
Define enculturation
What are some goals and methods of
ethnographic fieldwork?
What is racism
from a cultural
anthropological
perspective?
What is unilineal
evolutionism?
Explain participant
observation as a fieldwork
method.
Relativism is the understanding that a
group’s knowledge, social systems, beliefs,
and ways of doing things are relative to that
group’s environment, its history, and its
circumstances. To understand one part of a
culture is to realize that it is part of a whole
and cannot be separated and understood
without knowing more about the whole.
For the sake of scientific accuracy,
anthropologists must suspend judgment in
order to understand the logic and dynamic of
other cultures.
One extreme of relativism is to have no
opinion – even when issues concern human
rights and human atrocities. To say, “Well,
that’s just their culture” in response to killing,
torture, and concentration camps is extreme
relativism. Human rights, however you define
them, are perhaps a dividing line for
relativity.
When Europeans began to expand their travels over
the globe, they found people who lived differently
than they did. These travelers wanted to explain why
these differences existed. Believing that Western
Europe was the pinnacle of human evolution, travel
writers and social thinkers often theorized that
peoples must all start out “primitive” and then, over
time, progress to an “advanced” state. People in
other places would eventually “evolve” to be like
Europeans. This way of thinking was called
unilineal evolutionism. Early anthropologists
subscribed to this theory. It became a common way
to compare European and EuroAmerican societies
with others.
Many people still tend to think along these lines.
Most anthropologists have long since abandoned this
view of human differences. The proposed stages of
unilineal evolution were savagery to barbarism to
agriculture and then to urban-based civilization.
People were thought to evolve socially from simple
to more complex societies.
Participant observation is a
primary approach to data
collection in ethnography. The
researcher immerses
herself/himself in the culturesharing group and becomes a
participant within the setting
(Creswell, 1998).
Ethnocentrism is:
The belief that one’s own culture, religion,
way of doing things, beliefs, economic
system etc. is superior. All peoples, to
some extent, believe their group’s ways of
doing things are best. If people did not
respect their own group’s worldview, they
would likely not follow the rules and
expectations of their group. Social
cohesion would be difficult. We are a
group animal, so ethnocentrism is partly
about survival.
However the extremes of ethnocentrism
are ugly. They include fear, hatred, racism,
war, genocide, culturecide, etc.
Linguistic anthropology is the study of human
speech and language.
Physical or biological anthropology
this is the study of human biology
within the framework of genetic
changes in populations over time …
or evolution
it is the study of how biology
interacts with culture. We are born
with our biology. We learn our
culture. But culture influences biology
and biology influences how we learn
culture.
Archaeology is the study of earlier cultures
and lifeways. Anthropologists find and recover
material remains of past cultures. They analyze
and interpret those remains.
Cultural anthropology is the study of all
aspects of human life in, and associated with,
groups.
Enculturation is how we learn culture.
We understand culture because we
pick it up through the interactions we
have with other people throughout
childhood and until we die.
We learn as children by the way people
react to us and our behavior. We learn
culture from everyone around us and
the things they do and say. Rarely do
people give us formal lessons about
culture because most of culture is
taken for granted. No one necessarily
tells us how to behave in an elevator,
for example.
Culture is the acquired
knowledge that people in a
culture group share and use
to interpret their world and
generate social behavior.
Culture is learned, shared,
arbitrary, integrated,
symbolic, moral, limit setting,
changing, adaptive, and
sometimes maladaptive.
We learn a great deal of our culture
while we learn language, and without
language there would be no culture.
Participant observation as a
method of fieldwork research.
Informal and formal interviews
as a method of fieldwork
research.
(There are other research tools as well.)
Emic perspective as a research
and analytical goal.
Etic perspective as a research
and analytical goal.
Hypothesis as a tool in
research.
Theory as a tool in analysis.
Ethnography as an end result.
Ethnology as an end result.
The definition of racism is the belief that
some human populations are superior to
others because of inherited, geneticallytransmitted characteristics.
Perhaps racism also includes the very belief
that there exist biologically separate races.
Many Americans believe that people can be
divided into races.
Cultural anthropologists have long argued that
racial groups are cultural constructions.
These cultural constructions represent the way
North Americans, or other societies, classify
people rather than a genetically determined
reality.
As most biological anthropologists agree, no
group of humans has been isolated from other
humans long enough to make whole groups of
people significantly different.
We are one of the least diverse species, which
means we are a young species as species go.