CULTURE
Assignment: read the second chapter of your Textbook, “Perspectives…” about the Culture concept.
About culture, I hope you have already realized that CULTURE(chapter 1)is more than people’s music and food.
I am asking you to carefully read the vignette about “Meeting Bob…” and have noticed a couple of key aspects that he mentions to the anthropologists. What are they? Who is Bob? (other than a diabetic person with a service dog).
I also hope you understood how the “OTHER” is constructed after reviewing the classic “Gulliver’s Travels” and can say what a story can convey.
Please consider the role of anthropologists as cultural participants; do not neglect the work of very famous “off the veranda” anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, and others, not only as ethnographers (doing fieldwork and carefully describing cultural aspects of a society) but also as theorists.
Could you define FUNCTIONALISM? STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM, CULTURAL RELATIVISM?
I am going to create the Forum ‘Culture” where I would like you to respond to the following questions as thoughtfully as possible, after reading the chapter.
Discussion Questions
1. How did the armchair anthropology and the off-the-veranda approaches differ as methods to study culture? What can be learned about a culture by experiencing it in person that cannot be learned from reading about it?
2. Why is the concept of culture difficult to define? What do you think are the most important elements of culture?
3. Why is it difficult to separate the “social” from the “cultural?” Do you think this is an important distinction?
4. In the twenty-first century, people have much greater contact with members of other cultures than they did in the past. Which topics or concerns should be priorities for future studies of culture?
5. Write down the story of a fable (story with a message) from your cultural tradition. Then identify elements of the fable that attempt to teach cultural values. What are those values, and do they still matter today?
After reading the second chapter, on CULTURE, do you see any possible common threads with the film Human’s Musics? Explain. Again, here is the link of the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uog4eCZTUX4