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• 1 Week 1

• 1.1 Anthropology

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• What is the goal of Anthropology

  
  Anthropology tries to account for
  1. the social and cultural variation in the world, and conceptualizing 
  2. understanding similarities between social systems and human relationships

• To what does the term culture refer?

  
  Culture is learned, shared human behavior and ideas, which can and do change with time.

• 1.1.2 What do anthropologists do?

• What do anthropologists do? Name 3 points

  1. Trying to understand both connections within societies and between societies
  2.  Accounting for different aspects of human existence and investigating these interrelationships
  taking as their point of departure a detailed study of local life in a particular society3.  Asking large questions, while at the same time drawing most insights from small places

• 1.1.5 The universal and the particular

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• What is the central problem of anthropology?

  The diversity of human social life

• Anthropology tries to strike a balance between ............... and ............

  similarities and differences

• 1.1.6 The problem of Ethnocentrism

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• What do we do to understand people's lives

  
  try to grasp the totality of their experiential world; and in order to succeed at this project, it is adequate to look at selected, isolated variables

• 1.2.1 Periods in the history of Anthropology

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• Proto-anthropology was in the 18th century. What were the main points at that time?

  
  ▪ Universalism (communality) vs relativism (unique)
  ▪ Ethnocentrism (own culture) vs cultural relativism (understand culture in own words)
  ▪ Humanity vs the animal kingdom

• Victorian anthropology was during the 19th century. At this time they believed in social evolution. What is social evolution?

  ▪ The idea that human societies developed in a particular direction
  ▪ The notion that European societies were the end-product of development which began with savagery

• Why was this idea typical of the victorian age?

  
  it is dominated by an optimistic belief in technological progress and, simultaneously, European colonialism, (which was frequently justified with reference to what Kipling famously wrote of as ‘the white man’s burden’; the alleged duty of the European to ‘civilize the savages’)

• What was Maine his insight on victorian anthropology in his book Ancient law (1861)?

  
  Maine distinguished between status and contract
  societies, a divide which corresponds roughly to later dichotomies between traditional and modern societies