Culture and Meaning

Question 1

Dualism

Answer 1

Belief that reality consists of 2 different but equal parts (mind vs. matter; spirit vs. flesh)

Question 2

Idealism

Answer 2

Human nature is reduced to ideas

Question 3

Materialism

Answer 3

Human nature is reduced to biology

Question 4

Holism

Answer 4

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts; based on the assumption that mind and body, person and society, humans and their environment interpenetrate and define one another

Question 5

Comparative

Answer 5

Examines similarities and differences between societies

Question 6

Relativistic

Answer 6

Treats each culture equally and with respect

Question 7

Difference between anthro and socio

Answer 7

Anthro has a comparative approach

Question 8

Anthropological research

Answer 8

• Long term and with same populations
• Based in reciprocity
• Reflect on own power/positioning and stance
• Results in ethnography (description of 1 culture) or ethnology (description of multiple)
• NO exoticizing cultures
• Provides view of culture from native POV
• Fieldworker must balance emic (insider) and etic (outsider) POV

Question 9

“Thick” description

Answer 9

Details about life and context (e.g. wink vs. twitch)

Question 10

Applied anthropology

Answer 10

Use tools of anthro to solve modern problems

Question 11

The culture concept

Answer 11

• System of meanings about nature of experience shared by people
• Frame through which we see the world
• Considered tacit knowledge (taken for granted)

Question 12

Determinism

Answer 12

Reduction of complex events to single forces

Question 13

Influence of genes and culture on human nature

Answer 13

Mutual shaping of genes and culture; nurture AND nature

Question 14

Archaeology

Answer 14

Study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture.

Question 15

Biological anthropology

Answer 15

Concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their related non-human primates and their extinct hominin ancestors

Question 16

Linguistic anthropology

Answer 16

Study of how language influences social life

Question 17

Principles of anthropological research

Answer 17

• Holistic
• Comparative and relativistic
• Evolutionary (changes over time)

Question 18

Today, many cultural anthropologists study….

Answer 18

• Study one domain of human activity
• Reject labels such as “primitive” or “savage”
• Engage in fieldwork (prolonged exposure to fieldsite)

Question 19

Medical anthropology

Answer 19

Broadly defined as the study of health, illness and healing through time and across cultural settings.
Emerged post WWII, in relation to international development

Question 20

Anthropologists view humans as biocultural organisms because

Answer 20

• We have a capacity to use symbolic thought
• Our genetic makeup allows us to create and use culture
• Our survival as biological organisms depends on our ability to adapt

Question 21

What do the bee larvae, and the Christmas ox have to do with culture?

Answer 21

• Reveal our distinctions between what is considered to be “normal” and “not normal” in a given culture
• Comes down to our natural reactions, such as disgust at eating ‘strange’ foods, or confusion about why a gift would not be praised
• Culture not just cerebral, but embodied and visceral

Question 22

Debate on culture is focused on:

Answer 22

• The use of culture (singular) vs. cultures (plural, ways of life of specific group)
• The ways that the concept has been used to oppress people considered “other”
  E.g. Essentializing culture or ‘freezing’ in tradition
• How the term can be used in a way that most anthropologists can agree on (e.g. anthropologists must exoticize their own cultures as well, see culture as dynamic rather than static, and situate their analyses within a wider political social framework)

Question 23

Ethnocentrism

Answer 23

The opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct, indeed the only way of being human
E.g. Cultural “baggage”

Question 24

Cultural relativism

Answer 24

• A methodological concept
• The perspective that all cultures are equally valid and can only be truly understood in their own terms
• Makes moral reasoning more complex

Question 25

Why is the argument that “my culture made me do it” flawed?

Answer 25

• Humans do not passively follow their culture
• There is dissent and resistance to some cultural norms and beliefs
• Cultures are not uniform within
• Alternative perspectives may exist within cultures based on experience and choice
• Cultural relativism does not endorse practices that are harmful merely because they are cultural

Question 26

Consensus on culture

Answer 26

• Culture is learned, not genetically programmed
• Learned culture (and how it is learned) is always shaped by power relations of some kind
• No culture is “pristine” or untouched by the outside world
• It is incorrect to assume that penetration of local communities by global forces dooms all cultural traditions to extinction – they often adapt and “indigenize” cultural elements from elsewhere

Question 27

The anthropological perspective makes life more complicated by

Answer 27

• Forcing us to question common-sense assumptions
• Making moral and political decisions more difficult
• Encouraging us to decrease ethnocentric thinking

Question 28

Promise of anthropological perspective

Answer 28

It provides a holistic, comparative, and cross-cultural understanding of the human condition(s) and exposes us to the diversity of other ways of living