It's 11/14/08 normal in other cultures for infants to be exposed to the act of human creation. Our attitudes towards sexuality are not all the same. Culture: it shapes how we think about the world around us, and how we act around the world around us. Culture involves all kinds of basic assumptions of human nature. The assumption of the nature of humans, and we assume that humans are innately evil, and that's why we have laws. This assumption about the nature of humans is shaped by culture ? In American values, the more important part of culture emphasizes husband wife relationship. Family values go the nature of the mother infant bond, those are cultural values. Nature of competition, how impossible it is to think about societies without competition? You cant, and there are human societies that don't value human competition. Think about the nature of the deity, and how it would be if the main deity would be female, how would this family values or gender relationships? Culture is more than how to shake hands, it consists of the fundamental perceptions of how the world works. The challenge is recognizing that different people have the cultural values. Cultural relativity reminds us that those perspectives are just as equal as our perspectives. What makes anthro diff from other social sciences is that this combo of all of these things together make anthropology different. We can also see how thse differences allow anthro to be in a wide variety of different careers. Anthropology is diverse because each anthropologist specializes in 4 different subfields. 1. Biological/ Physical anthropology- these are interested in what makes us humans from a biological pt of view. The questions they are interested in are how did we come to be who we are, how are we physically different from all other organisms, where did we come from? Others are interested in what makes us human and what makes us in common with other human relatives? Other biological anthro are interested in how we can explain the genetic variation among human populations. Other bio anthr are into how this genetic variation affects health care. Biological anthropologists require specialists from genetics, zoologists (ppl who specialize in study of primates), psychologists (social, brain behavior), and we also need medical professionals to learn about diseases and the spread, etc. 2. Archaeology- interested in what makes us human, but they study human beings of the past. You can see archaeology as letting us go back in the past to look at present day societies, and all human societies. It expands the data base of human comparison through all time. The challenge they face is studying human behavior of the past. They have to look at the past evidence of human behavior, and cannot ask questions. They are not interested in stuff, only in human beings. One question asked is why would human beings want to create complex societies? How can we test that people want to live in large societies? We have to go back in time before the societies were here and see if life before was better than life now. Another assumption of complex societies, in large scale societies there are leaders, why would people give up individual freedom for another leader? Others are interested in knowing why some societies failed? What lessons can we learn about sustainability, from societies from the past. Others are interested in the process of domestication. How can we document the lives of people who lived outside of
history? We know a lot about our neighbor, but archaeology can give a voice of the people who were not recorded. It can help us further paint a picture of those people as well. Archaeologists need geologists, who can pinpoint the location of the stuff they find, botanists and biologists are needed to know what the environment was like and what people ate, we need anatomists to tell us what the age of people wre when they died, where there diseases? We need cultural anthropologists to tell us how people today lived in relation to them. Architects are needed to know what small or large buildings to let us know about their living. Historians to let us know about their living. 3. Cultural Anthropology: Interested in what it means to be human and in order to get at what it means to be human we study present day societies. The questions asked are how do people use their environment to have resources. Others are interested in economic exhange systems, how do societies decide who gets what, others study different kinds of family systems. What kind of decisions do societies make about relationships between marriages and how does it impact society? Some are interested in belief systems; how do societies create or reinforce concepts of the supernatural? Is it possible in large societies like ours that the supernatural is distant? Is it a coincidence that in a society where male is over female, that the deity is male? How do individuals learn society's values? It also relies on specialists, but cultural anthropologists are different from others. For example spending time watching people, the etic/emic perspective. Also as anthropologists they are also cross-cultural. Another specialization is linguistics; language is the mechanism by which human beings learn culture. They are intricately connected, and so linguists are interested in how language is created in the first place; what about the sounds that are possible to make and the ones chosen to use. Some care about how languages are put together, is there any kind of common structural similarity to all human languages? How is possible for the human to actually learn languages? How is it possible for every human being in every human society to listen to the sounds around them and figure out how to talk? Some linguists are interested in how languages evolve in the first place and how as cultures change does language change? Finally, some are interested in how language is used in social context? How do you have your accent, and how do people portray you intelligence because of your accent? Linguists need help too, such as psychologists, historians tracking language change throughout time. A lot of them are working with computer experts, what is the mental process by which human beings require language? How does every 2 year old hear the sound around them and figure out how to talk? A lot of what anthropologists do can be applied to solving problems, and this is sort of an alternate focus to the subfields. Applied anthropology takes basic the features and applies them to solving real life problems, some that are small and grand scale? Other disciples do this too, such as social works, but so does anthropology. Think of anthropology as a way to understand "us." Biological Anthropology: One of the issues looked at are how similar and different are we with our closest living relatives? Whatever differences that do exist today, how do those differences evolve? We look at the fossil record to see how human beings evolved through time. Physical evidence is fossilized, but behavior is not fossilized, so we look to our closest looking relatives for answers. We also look at the biological variation of humans today and ask what advantages and set backs can be given. To understand of how
we became human, we need to understand the concept of evolution. It's the idea of the change through time with the accumuable change of traits? The idea is as well established as any other scientific explanations and is not being challenged by another scientific explanation. How did this process through time happen, we know it did, the question is how? One explanation of how things changed through time is Darwin. In his time it was common to question the origin of societies, and Darwin was a product of his time, spectulation about how to explain to origins of time that anybody can see. Where did he draw upon his ideas? One idea came from geology, the idea meant that the geological features that we see on the earth must have taken a very long time to make. This gave dariwn a window of time for change to occur over a long period, so he used it . Another is a 19th century demographer, that as time changed, there were a lot of people were in poverty. He argued that human pop grows faster than available food supply, which means there is always going to be some people who don't have enough to eat. Darwin applied this to a grander scale, and another idea he used is decades of experience. One thing he noticed is that there a resemblance between animals and plants today and those in records. He noticed that some geological features like coral reefs take a very long time to turn into islands and reefs. He also noticed similarities and diff b/t animals and plants in different parts of the world. How can we explain this? He synthesized this all into a theory of how things may have come to look the way they do. A theory isn't a guess, it's an explanation. He first said there were too many indiv to be born in each generation for all to survive, and expanded it to plants and animals as well. Secondly, anybody who has bred animals and plants that through time favorable traits can be inherited from one generation to the next. Not only are favorable traits are inherited from one generation to the next, but individuals in one generation don't look the same. What he didn't know what caused that variation or how variable traits could be inherited. He said variation extended within and between generations. Since there are too many to survive, and variation exists between generations, those individuals with the favorable traits are the ones who tend to survive require two subsets. He never said the fittest who survive; it's those with the best adaptations. This means that first you have to reproduce, and then you have to tend to survive. Those individuals with favorable traits tend to survive and pass them one. Fourthly, this is how evolution occurs, the species and populations of things end up looking different than their ancestral population. What impact did his idea of evolution have? One of the first misapplications came from social scientists, said if Darwin's arguing that the fittest survive in the natural world, social Darwinists said lets apply to the social world. These guys argued that if it's natural for less fit populations to disappear then maybe it's ok for less fit societies to disappear. Now American's didn't have to worry about the genocide of the native Americans, or the African slaves, because they were left fit than we are. Social Darwinism gave a perfect explanation to this kind of exploitation. It's danger because it takes advantage of people with less power. Also it is ethnocentric, just because they live in a smaller scale society doesn't mean we're better than them. Finally it assumes that complexity is the key to survival. The only survival key is Darwinism is long term growth. Since Darwin's original idea, his idea has been drastically modified through time. That'ts what all scientific theories need to do, they need to change through time as new info comes about and old is discarded. All scientific theories have to be changeable; this is
what we call the new synthesis, adding in new ideas into his and getting rid of the old ones. If we modify Darwin's original idea with the new synthesis, it becomes even better today than what it was 150 years ago. One of the new additions is genetics. Nobody knew anything about Gregor Mendel, and genetics drastically approved his theory. Not only did it explain variation could occur, but how favorable traits were passed on. Genetics allows us to test hypothesis. Another contribution was greater fossil evidence, he had very little fossil evidence to go on. Since that time, we have abundant fossil evidence to test that hypothesis. The other contribution is that we also need to eliminate old fashioned ideas that weakened his ideas. One of these ideas is the idea of progress. If you look at the diversity of life on earth, life does not go from simple to complex. Most of life's diversity started out as simple organisms, and most of life today is simple organisms. Also, just because organisms are complex doesn't mean they will survive, for example, the dinosaurs. We have plenty of examples of organism that go from complex to simple, such as parasites. Another idea to get rid of is slow change, yes Darwin proposed that life changed gradually, now this idea has been modified that yes sometimes life evolves gradually, but sometimes you have long periods of change and some of rapid change and then a change of stasis, this is called relative stasis, punctuated by rapid evolutionary change "punctuated equilibrium." The third idea to get rid of is determinism, and it's absolutely false that when you look at the history of life on earth, what you see is not a gradual improvement, you see chance occurrences. Certain kinds of events in life's history can be explained by chance, just like the weather.