1 / 12

Week 1 Introduction to the Social Sciences: Anthropology

Week 1 Introduction to the Social Sciences: Anthropology. Prof. Joel Stocker, Ph.D. Kaohsiung Medical University. Course Textbook. Schultz, E. A., & Lavenda, R. H. (2005). Cultural anthropology: a perspective on the human condition (6th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

selene
Télécharger la présentation

Week 1 Introduction to the Social Sciences: Anthropology

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Week 1Introduction to the Social Sciences: Anthropology Prof. Joel Stocker, Ph.D. Kaohsiung Medical University

  2. Course Textbook Schultz, E. A., & Lavenda, R. H. (2005). Cultural anthropology: a perspective on the human condition (6th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. (Available in the library)

  3. Course Grading (5 weeks) • 20% Attendance (including guest lecture) • 25% Participation and discussion (in class and online) • 20% Assignment: Anthropological field work exercise • 35% Quizzes (2)

  4. Schedule Highlights • Week 2: Quiz 1 (during discussion section) • Week 4: Hand in your written Assignment: fieldwork exercise (2-3 pages in English) • Week 4: Before class, watch the film Nanook of the North online or in the library • Week 5: Quiz 2 (during discussion section) • Dec. 8: Guest speaker, Dr. Huang (Friday, 2PM)

  5. The Social Sciences • The rise of the social sciences • Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology

  6. What is anthropology? The study of • human nature, human culture and society, and the human past; • how human biology, prehistory and history, economics, politics, religion, and kinship shape one another to make human life what it is; • local contexts situated in broader social, cultural, and political matrices; • what it means to be human.

  7. Anthropology’s Four Subfields • Biological (or physical) anthropology • The study of human beings as living organisms different from and similar to other animals. (subfields: primatology & paleoanthropology) • Archaeology (often spelled “archeology”) • The study of human remains for evidence of past cultural activity. • Linguistic anthropology • The study of language in relation to the broader cultural, historical, and biological contexts that make language possible. • Cultural & Social Anthropology • The study of cultural variation in people’s learned beliefs, ideas, and behaviors as members of a society.

  8. Basic Concepts in Sociocultural Anthropology • Culture • Comparative (cross-cultural comparison, generalization) • Holistic (integrative, whole greater than parts) • Domains of culture (biology, psychology, politics, economics, history, kinship, religion, communication, performance, etc.) • Symbol (abstract relationships) • Explaining human nature: dualism & determinism, materialism & idealism, empiricism & positivism, qualitative & quantitative (cf. holism) • Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism • Fieldwork (extensive, intensive involvement with a group) • Participant-observation (in multiple local contexts) • Reflexivity (highlighting intersubjective meaning creation) • Ethnography (writing about cultures)

  9. Culture • People’s learned beliefs, ideas, and behaviors as members of a society. • Human culture is learned, shared, patterned, adaptive, and symbolic. • The main way in which human groups differ from one another. • Began over 5 million years ago with hominid bipedalism and opposable thumb & fingers; 2.5 million years ago with stone tools; 200,000 years ago with homo sapiens’ complex symbolic representation and social organization.

  10. Assignment: field work exercise • Due Week 4 (beginning of class). • 2-3 pages, in English, typed & printed. • 30 minutes or more, observe and participate in the lives of several, or a group, of people. • Record their as well as your own behavior, thoughts, and feelings. Take notes. • Include in your report: method of observation, location and participants (setting and characters), research-related issues you experienced, and the social patterns and forms of cultural communication you observed.

  11. Next Week’s Reading • Schultz & Lavenda, Chapter 5. Language.

  12. Discussion Questions • Can cultural anthropology be used to study modern societies and large-scale urban societies? • What’s the difference between sociology and anthropology? Is it a matter of methods, topics, scale, academic tradition, or what? • Share your ideas about the difference between society and culture (which we’ll discuss more in the coming weeks). • Is cultural anthropology, as a “soft” science, less valid as a means of understanding reality, compared with “hard sciences” such as mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry? • Is there a universal knowledge? If so, could you call it a universal culture? Are the “natural sciences” really so “natural”?

More Related