ANTH 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Social Evolution, Participant Observation, Essentialism
22 Apr 2014
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Document Summary
In an anthropological sense, culture is a shared and negotiated system of meaning informed by knowledge that people learn and put into practice by interpreting experience and generating behaviour . Culture is a process -> a dynamic process, at times messy, complex and nebulous. Two meanings: as a field method, as a genre of literature. Bronislaw malinowski: he spent 4 years living in the trobriand islands, and wrote argonauts of the. Western pacific (1922) which deeply influenced the development of modern ethnography. This was one of his main contributions to anthropology: like franz boas, he challenged theories of social evolution and advocated the suspension of one"s judgement for cultural understanding. Malinowski"s view: we must adopt the native"s point of view: like franz boas, he proposed that to truly understand a particular group of people, one has to spend an extensive period of time living among them.
