ANTHROP 1AA3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Cultural Relativism, Gender Role, Ethnocentrism
14 Nov 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Learned via enculturation and is not biological/innate. Can make particular groups of people distinctive. Anthropology, geography, sociology, psychology- all study people. Interdisciplinary perspective: working together with other specialists to get a more complete picture of culture. Anthropologists fight against: ethnocentrism: the erroneous idea that one"s culture and its values are somehow right or superior to another culture"s. Many people therefore judge another culture according to the standards of their own: often involves overcoming culture shock, examples of ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism: an approach adopted and promoted by anthropologists, the opposite of ethnocentrism, understanding another society in its own terms. Ask questions like: how do gendered rituals often- but not always- employ gender markers in ways that maintain dominant stereotypes of gender. What do they tell us about gender in our society: wodaabe. Anthropologists argue that we must use cultural relativism and change must come from within a society: tostan movement, starting in 1991.
