Introducing Cultural
Anthropology
Roberta Edwards Lenkeit
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Language: Is This What Makes
Us Human?
©2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Language: Is This What Makes
Us Human?
The Study of Language
 Human Versus Non-human Systems of
Communication
 Silent Language as Part of Symbolic
Communication
 Summary

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Study of Language
Descriptive Linguistics
 Historical Linguistics
 Language and Culture
 The Complexity of Languages

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Descriptive Linguistics

Phonology
– Phoneme

Morphology and Syntax
– Morpheme
– Syntax
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Historical Linguistics

Historical Linguistics studies the
relationships of languages to one another
and reconstructs how languages change
over time.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Language and Culture

Ethnolinguistics
–a specialized field that analyzes the
relationship between a language and culture.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
–states that language constructs our perception
of reality.

Sociolinguistics
–the evaluation of the relationship between
language and culture.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Complexity of Languages
All Human Languages Are Complex
 All languages have different ways to
categorize observable variations in the
natural world.

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Human Versus Non-Human
Systems of Communication
Symbols vs. Calls
 Displacement
 Chimpanzees and ASL
 Chimpanzees and Lexigrams

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Silent Language as Part of
Symbolic Communication
Kinesics
 Proxemics
 Cultural Time
 Words
 Silence
 Material Culture

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Summary
Language is a symbolic means of
communication.
 Human language differs from the
communication systems of other animals
because we have open systems.
 The nonverbal symbolic communication
systems of silent language are important
aspects of culture.

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.