ANTHRO 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: East Los Angeles College, Marvin Harris, Emic And Etic
Document Summary
Cultures are the product of unconscious processes of the human mind. Levi-strauss concentrated on identifying the mental structures that undergrid social behavior. A theoretical approach that focuses on the ways in which members of a culture classify their world. Attempt to collect ethnographic data that does not include the observer"s own cultural biases. Ethno-scientists seek to understand a people"s world from their point of view (emic. The problem is that it is really idealistic, and that is not possible to describe all of the cultures in the world and that you need a lot of time and funding to do that. System reanalysis of the role women play in the social structure. Themes of study: social construction of gender, work and production, reproduction and sexually, body image, and how gender influences economic, political and social power. Material conditions or modes of production determine human thoughts and behavior. Anthropology is seen as scientific, empirical, and capable of generating casual explanations.
