Académique Documents
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Culture Documents
Anthro 3 AC is the lower division introduction to Cultural Anthropology. This course also fulfils the American
Cultures course requirement by focusing on the historical, cultural, and political formation of America as a society
of native residents and successive waves of both voluntary and forced immigrants. Ultimately, this course is
about what it means to be an American as well as what it means to be human and therefore a bearer of culture.
Cultural Anthropology is the intimate and personal study of human cultures, societies, and changing social,
economic and political situations in an increasingly globalized world. Anthropology is intimate and personal
because the field requires the anthropologist to live-in and live-with the people and communities they are trying to
understand. Anthropological knowledge is gained though cultural immersion as well as through careful scholarship
and learning. Beginning with the early 20th century, cultural anthropologists, some as 'explorers', some as
'scientists', some as great writers and 'public intellectuals', traveled far and wide and wrote books (called
ethnographies) about the people and cultures they encountered. In these books anthropologists tried to make "the
strange" and the "exotic" seem more familiar to their American, or French, or British readers. At the same time
anthropologists tried to unbalance and to "make strange" what was taken for granted, what was commonsense in
their own societies.
Cultural anthropology was always about what we could learn about ourselves by studying others. So, the classical
era anthropologists asked such still relevant questions as: Why do American families have to live in nuclear
households when in so many other cultures families were embedded in much larger extended households in
which work, household maintenance, and child rearing could be shared among kin? Is marriage always about
love? What happens to couples where elders arrange marriages for their children? Do they come to love each
other? Or is love, as we know it, beside the point? Are little girls 'feminine' and 'sensitive' in all cultures and
societies? Are men in all societies aggressive and dominant? Are teenagers rebellious in every society? Do people
everywhere reason the same? Does 1+1= 2 in every society? Do we all see the same colors? Do people get sick or
go " crazy" in the same way and for the same reasons? What is 'cultural'? What is 'natural'? The simple answer
to these complex questions is that in certain fundamental we are all undeniably strange and exotic to our cultural
others. But cultural anthropology breaks down and explains the differences that may seem so 'scary', so
'irrational', so opaque (hard to understand) by showing that beyond cultural differences, beyond cultural pluralisms,
beyond what is called multiculturalism, there is also a shared humanity.
Classical cultural anthropology (1900-1950s) was concerned with careful descriptions of semi-isolated smallscale, non-literate, technologically "simple" communities and "exotic" peoples ( including headhunters, sorcerers,
and cannibals) who were seen as radically different and at odds with the so-called "civilized" world. But today both
the world and the subjects of anthropology have changed dramatically. People, ideas, labor, knowledge, the arts,
medicine, and technologies travel easily across national boundaries impacting both the countries of origin and the
countries to which these populations and cultures gravitate. Once confident distinctions between 'us' and 'them',
the West and 'the rest' have blurred as people from formerly colonized societies in Africa, Asia, and the
Americas and cultural, ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities in all societies have challenged the dominance of the
"first" world and its claims to superiority and cultural, economic and political dominance. Throughout these
transformations anthropologists have been present on the sidelines, observing, participating, and 'taking note' of
the events, ultimately trying to make sense of them.
This is an American cultures course with a difference. The course is guided by the anthropological method of
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