Cultural Anthropology - Through Student Eyes

2018

2018

Building on last year's successful launch of the journal, Student Anthropologist continues the tradition of giving students in Anthropology and any students interested in anthropology, the chance to make their voices heard on issues they find pertinent. The journal gives students an opportunity to see their work in print, providing them a chance to see what the world of anthropology is all about once they leave the confines of university. Eight submissions were selected this year, based on the input of five editors. The topics are diverse, covering issues such as consumerism, cultural appropriation, land ownership, and indigenous rights. As with last year, the papers are of cultural anthropology, again due to greater interest in topics in that field.

IGNOU, 2022

Broadly, anthropology can be divided into academic anthropology and practicing anthropology considering the career choices pursued by the trained anthropologists. We will be discussing these two domains at length in this unit. The term ‘applied’ or ‘practicing’ anthropologists are used inter-changeably in this unit to keep it simple for the purpose of understanding. However, there are scholars (Baba 2009; Nolan 2003) who make a distinction between ‘applied’ and ‘practicing’ anthropologists too. Applied anthropologists generally oscillate between academic and non-academic settings. Both practicing and applied anthropology have their focal point of policy formulation rather than contributing to pure theoretical knowledge.

This course will introduce students to the basic concepts anthropologists use to describe human interactions. We will acquire a vocabulary of terms, a sense of the history of the discipline and a chance to debate specific points of view proposed by the discipline. The relevance of anthropological systems approach to current events is a central challenge of the course. The instructor is committed to helping students formulate and express their own views and to consider what kinds of possibilities for involvement and responsibilities might be associated with their viewpoint.

A nthropology is the scientific study of the origin, the behaviour, and the physical, social, and cultural development of humans. Anthropologists

Instructor: Prof. Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera Office: 303 Silsby Hall Office Hours: M 3-5 and by appointment

Education in our culture

Instructor: Prof. Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera Office: 303 Silsby Hall Office Hours: M 3-5 and by appointment COURSE DESCRIPTION The goal of cultural anthropology is to understand human diversity in all its various manifestations around the world. Cultural anthropologists are interested in how societies and cultures work – how people in different places adapt to their environment, the various symbolic systems they use to communicate with each other, the political and religious systems that regulate their lives, the ways families are structured, and the ways they make a living. During this class we will learn about people's practices around the world, both to broaden our understanding of how culture structures and patterns the lives of different groups, and to gain a better understanding of ourselves. In an increasingly global world, we need to know who our neighbors are – and what our neighbors see when they look at us. We will begin by looking closely at the concept of culture as the central theme in anthropology, and how culture patterns human behavior. We will explore various aspects of life – including our perceptions of time and space, race, gender, marriage, sexuality, and family – to uncover how what we assume to be natural ways of living are made meaningful and are given value through culture. We will also look at the historical development of social and economic systems, the role of language in culture, and various systems of political power. We will conclude by looking at globalization, the lingering effects of colonialism on power relations across the globe, and we will critically examine projects of international development.

During the past two decades the relevance of various academic disciplines to college students has changed dramatically. In part, this is related to changing sociopolitical and economic attitudes among students about what a college education means in today's world. Also at issue, however, are fundamental changes in the way particular disciplines have met the needs of students during the past twenty years. Anthropology is one discipline that has experienced declining enrollments due to students' perceptions about the relevance of the field in the marketplace. In this article, we consider how such problems of relevance can be overcome by incorporating programs of academic and applied research directly into undergraduate anthropology curricula.

Practicing anthropology, 1991

Annals of Anthropological Practice, 2016

This course covers the basic areas of anthropology including biological evolution, the prehistoric evolution of early civilizations, language, culture and social life, and the analyses of the nature and variability of human institutions. However, the components that deal with cultural anthropology are heavily emphasized.

This paper is a social science cross disciplinary literature review of anthropology education. Anthropology education will be defined as the anthropological approach to examining education, that is the study of teaching and learning in both childhood and adulthood that transmits what a society describes as culturally relevant and meaningful knowledge. Three recurring themes have been found in both disciplines, they both make use of language, literacy, signs and symbols in their examinations.