ANTH 2550 Lecture Notes - Cultural Relativism

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 2550
• Professor: Tom Sherwood

Document Summary

Religion is universal and powerful, affecting behaviour, current events, politics, economics, law, and environment. The anthropological approach is located in a division of four sub-divisions: physical, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural ( social ). It is evidence based empirical, tries to deal with our own subjectivity objective, and tries to look at the whole picture holistic. It is also comparative, cross-cultural, and features cultural relativism. Religion can be defined as a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a groups of people struggles with (the) ultimate problems of human life (yinger, 1970:7). Religion is the answer as to why things happen.