Quizzes added to syllabus

1. Quizzes added to syllabus • First Quiz: ANTH 161-04: 9/25First Quiz: ANTH 161-02: 9/29 • Based on textbook reading for the day

2. Culture • What Is Culture? • Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice • Universality, Generality, and Particularity • Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Globalization

3. What Is Culture? • Therefore, culture can be studied scientifically • Enculturation – process by which a child learns his or her culture • Tylor proposed that culture are systems of human behavior and thought and obey natural laws

4. Culture Is Learned • Accumulation of knowledge about experiences and information not perceived directly by the organism, but transmitted to it through symbols – signs that have no necessary or natural connection with the things for which they stand • Cultural learning unique to humans

5. Culture Is Learned • Geertz defines culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols • Culture learned through both direct instruction and observation • Anthropologists in the 19th century argued for “psychic unity of man” • Acknowledges individuals vary in emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities but all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture

6. Culture Is Shared • Social transmission of culture tends to unify people by providing common experience • Commonality of experience tends to generate common understanding of future events • Culture located and transmitted in groups

7. Culture Is Symbolic • Verbal and nonverbal symbols • Usually linguistic, but also nonverbal • Other primates demonstrated rudimentary ability to use symbols • Symbolic thought unique and crucial to cultural learning

8. Culture and Nature • Culture converts natural urges and acts into cultural customs • Humans interact with cultural constructions of nature rather than directly with nature itself

9. Culture Is All-Encompassing • Everyone is cultured • To understand North American culture, one must consider television, fast-food restaurants, sports and games • Anthropological concept of culture is a model that includes all aspects of human group behavior

10. Culture Is Integrated • Changes in one aspect will likely generate changes in other aspects • Core values – sets of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that are basic in that they provide an organizational logic for the rest of the culture • Culture is a system

11. Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive • What’s good for individual isn’t necessarily good for group • Determining whether cultural practice is adaptive or maladaptive frequently requires viewing results of that practice from several perspectives • Humans have biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stress

12. Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice • Ideal culture – what people say they should do, not what they say they do • Real culture – actual behavior as observed by anthropologist • People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates

13. Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice • Agency – actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities • Practice Theory – recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence • Culture is both public and individual

14. Levels of Culture • International culture – practices common to identifiable group extending beyond boundaries of one culture • Subcultures – identifiable cultural patterns existing within a larger culture • National culture – experiences, beliefs, learned behavior patterns, and values shared by citizens of the same nation

15. Levels of Culture • Directdiffusion – members of two or more previously distinct cultures interact with each other • Indirectdiffusion – cultural artifacts or practices are transmitted from one culture to another through intermediate third (or more) culture • Cultural practices and artifacts are transmitted through diffusion

16. Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights • Cultural relativism – asserts cultural values are arbitrary, and therefore, values of one culture should not be used as standards to evaluate behavior of persons from outside that culture • Ethnocentrism – Use of values, ideals, and mores from one’s own culture to judge behavior of someone from another culture

17. Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights • Cultural rights – vested in groups and include a group’s ability to preserve its cultural tradition • Human rights – vested in individuals and includes the right to speak freely, to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and not be murdered, injured, enslaved, or imprisoned without charge.

18. Levels of Culture, with Examples from Sports and Foods

19. Universality, Generality, and Particularity • Universals traits are ones that more or less distinguish Homo sapiens from other species • Biological • Psychological • Universality

20. Universality, Generality, and Particularity • Regularities that occur in different times and places but not all cultures • Diffusion • Colonization • Particularities • Traits or features of culture not generalized or widespread • Particularities may be getting rare • Generalities

21. Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Borrowing of traits between cultures • Direct – between two adjacent cultures • Indirect – across one or more intervening cultures or through some long-distance medium • Forced – through warfare, colonization, or some other kind of domination • Unforced – intermarriage, trade, and the like • Diffusion

22. Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Exchange of features that results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact • May occur in any or all groups engaged in such contact • Acculturation

23. Globalization • Economic and political forces take advantage of modern systems of communication and transportation to promote globalization • Allows larger economic and political systems to dominate local people • Series of processes that work to make modern nations and people increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent