ANTHRO 2A Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cultural Relativism, Emic And Etic, Appropriate Behavior
Document Summary
Week 2 (oct. 5) a brief history of anthropology. Culture is a system of meaning embedded in symbols. Characteristic/aspects of culture: cultural symbols are arbitrary/artificial, culture is learned. It is not innate: no culture is static(unchanging) / all culture have history, all cultures have some level of social inequality. Key terms: ethnocentrism the belief that your own society is superior, cultural relativism - the practice of suspending your own cultural biases in order to better understand another culture , emic & etic. Etic = cultural outsider"s point of view: fieldwork or participant-observation the method of research used by cultural anthropologists, ethnography reports the findings made by anthropologists. In the past time, this was always written. But today ethnographer can be found in other media format: video, film, etc: holistic perspective anthropologist seek to understand how different aspect of a culture are coordinated. Between the 1500 & 1800s enormous political & social changes occurs european.
