Week 2 Overview
Topic
Anthropology and the Study of Culture
Goals
By the end of this week you should be able to:
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- Define general anthropology and its four fields and their goals and approaches.
- Explain what is distinctive about cultural anthropology compared to the other three fields of anthropology and in comparison to some other disciplines.
- Define the concept of cultural relativism and assess its strengths and limitations.
- List the three key debates in cultural anthropology and be able to analyze an issue from each side of the debates.
- Discuss approaches to defining the concept of culture.
- Define what microcultures are and on what bases they are formed; provide examples.
- Discuss the relevance of cultural anthropology for the contemporary world.
- Recognize the links between cultural anthropology and careers.
- Discuss the culture of the San people of southern Africa and contemporary challenges they are facing.
- Recognize and locate the places that appear in the maps in this chapter and know something about their social characteristics.
Please click the Lecture 1 Audio link and follow the instructions for downloading Blackboard Collaborate. You will need this program to listen to/watch all of the course lecture material. Once you have downloaded Collaborate, you can listen to and watch Lecture 1.
Weekly Schedule
| Due date | Activity |
| 1/31 | Reading: Miller Ch. 1, pp. 3-24 |
| 1/31 | Assignment: 'If I were an Anthropologist' |