Anthropology

That would be structuralism. Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist who was the nephew of Emile Durkheim, who taught and heavily influenced Claude Levi-Strauss, who was widely considered to be the...

The Ju/'hoansi get their food largely through the provision of foreign aid. It wasn't always like this, however. Traditionally, the Ju/'hoansi were hunters and gatherers. Because they were expert...

The scientific field of anthropology is the study of human beings and their societies; it is generally divided into two disciplines, cultural and physical anthropology. Physical anthropologists...

Holism is an essential part of anthropology, which is a social science dedicated to the study of humankind. Although it is most often mentioned as an element of socio-cultural anthropology, the...

In anthropology, the definition of culture has three aspects to it. Let us look at the definition and then at each of the three elements or components that make it up. For anthropologists, culture...

Errington and Gewertz state that their major objection to Jared Diamond's argument in Collapse is Diamond's claim that societies make an active choice to either succeed or fail. They emphasize...

Tressa Berman's Circle of Goods examines several themes relating to tribal economies in the Northern Plains. Its core narration revolves around the system mentioned in her title: the "circle of...

To help you get started on this exercise, let's first look at some aspects of Ju/'hoansi culture, including their traditional hunter-gatherer economy, their commitment to sharing, their trance...

I think that the paradox that Lancy brings out is the idea that the neontocracy that is such a part of America is what precisely prevents American parents from voicing a universal protection for...

This question is still debated among archaeologists and anthropologists. Recent findings have overturned the old theory that there was only one migration of the Clovis people which resulted in the...

As we have limited online access to the book Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, below are a few ideas to help get you started. You...

The “applied” nomenclature in a topic means that “theory” is “applied” to a real-life question. Since Anthropology is the study of Man (anthros), the theories put forward by all the social...

I think your answer here will really vary depending on what your professional plans are. I've spent the majority of my career in various facets of education, so I can speak from that lens....

Essentialism is the view that for any entity, as in indigent colonized indigenous peoples, there is "a set of attributes" that identify and define the indigenous entity. Canada is seeking in a...

In anthropology, cultural relativism can be defined as the idea that a society’s customs and beliefs should be described objectively and that they should be understood in the context of the...

Before addressing where anthropology might fit into the overall scheme of things, first let's talk about the sciences vs. humanities "debate." (This "debate" really is the sciences vs. the...

The article "Hidden Aspects of Communication" deals primarily with nonverbal communication, with some comparisons between different societies. The study of nonverbal communication arguably began as...

In our world, there are many different cultures. Different countries have different cultures and even different parts of different countries can have different cultures. If we stayed our whole...

In terms of socioeconomic ends, with Conrad Kottak’s definition of anthropology as the "holistic, systematic, and comparative study of humanity" in mind, subsistence has changed radically from what...

In simple terms, these calcium-dense parts of the human body are often the only remains to study in anthropologic digs. Because bones and teeth accumulate matter as a person grows through life...

Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies sustained themselves predominately by hunting large, migrating land mammals, following them for days and weeks on end. Researchers assert that sedentary living...

There are two way that families, kinship and descent connect. The first is through how they each are constructed. The second is through the function of each. Descent is the means of tracking...

I think that another way of defining the question is if one is bound by their cultural understandings in assessment of others. I think that one is always going to possess their own cultural...

Archaeology is a branch of science that explores the lives of the people and their societies in the past by digging remains, dating, organizing and restoring them from particular eras or...

We cannot know this for sure because human behavior cannot be objectively understood. However, the most likely reason for this is because our societies have until very recently been shaped by...

One way to gauge credibility is by applying what you already know. The more you know, the easier it is to determine the credibility of something. Remember, Dennis O’Neil starts off his article by...

Culture, for anthropologists, is (in rough terms) everything in a society that people think and do. This definition is broad enough to permit different approaches within cultural anthropology to...