Anthropology Observation Report

2. According to the information presented in class on the sex trade industry in Thailand, which of

There are beauty standards all over the world, but America has one of the most highest and unreachable standard of the all. In the article “Whose Body is This,” the author Katherine Haines reflects the issue on how narrow-minded society, magazine and the rest of media is depicting the perfect body. The ideal body in America is established as skinny, tall, perfect skin, tight body are characteristics that destroyed majority of woman’s self esteem (172). As girls get older and into their teen years, they have been brainwashed to need to look like the unrealistic, and photoshopped models in magazines and advertisements. Girls don’t feel comfortable to be in their own skin, because they were not taught to love themselves for who they are right in the beginning.

According to the novel, Paradigms for Anthropology Edited (An Ethnographic Reader) by E. Paul Durrenberger and Suzan Erem explained people consider their religious rituals as being their most creative expressions in indication of their cultural values as well as perspective. To study a religious belief including a ritual practice in another culture than one's own creates a series of difficulties. With such religious rituals cause their to be a search for attention and an explanation. Oftentimes, such beliefs cause there to be drama amongst others. Then all of a sudden, the people who were once considered reasonable become unsure if their beliefs when it's examined closely.

Judy is a 53 year old mother of two and grandmother of 3 grandchildren. On a simple trip to the store on afternoon, Judy’s life changed in just a split second. While waiting at a red light, Judy was rear ended and violently hit her head on the steering wheel. Judy states she tried to remove her seatbelt but was unable due to her arms being paralyzed. During this ordeal, Judy also stated that her pain felt as if “a knife had been stuck in her neck.” During her hospital stay the emergency room doctor told Judy that she was suffering from whiplash. While at the hospital, Judy kept telling the doctor that she was in a lot of pain, but no further testing could be performed, such as an MRI, because her insurance wouldn’t cover it. Judy was sent home with a cervical collar and the diagnosis of whiplash. Unable to have very much mobility and having a hard time lying down, one night while

What is anthropology? This is a question that can be answered in numerous ways, but we are going to define it as simple as possible. If we break the word down into its two components it means the study of human beings. “Anthropo” means human beings or human kind and “logy” or “logia” is Greek for the study or knowledge of something. When we put it all together, it is the study of human beings which can be very broad. Anthropology can be broken down into four subfields: physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

1. In which region and in what country is San Basilio located? What is the language of the linguistic minority in this region? What are the cultural advantages of being in this linguistic minority?

1. Based on reading this selection, how is ethnographic research different from other social science approaches to research?

Horticulture is defined as "the production of plants using a simple nonmechanized technology" (Nanda and Warms 2006:148), while Webster's Dictionary defines horticulture as the art or science of growing fruits, vegetables, plants, flowers, or trees. When most people think of horticulture, they simply think of gardening or farming. Most people do not associate horticulture with culture itself or how horticulture relates to anthropology, or the study human culture. In all actuality, horticulture is a major part of cultural anthropology. The groups that hunt and grow food, and the associated eating rituals or ceremonies associated with food differs by culture or environment. This paper will discuss the subsistence pattern of horticulture as

Me: As I performed the posture test on myself I already knew that I would have proper posture. Due to the fact that when I was younger, I looked in the mirror and noticed that I had a slouchy posture. I had (Lordosis) and an anterior pelvic tilt, which made me look awful from a side point of view. I wanted to fix my posture and learned that I had weak abdominal muscles and tight hamstrings along with weak gluteus maximus muscles. As I learned how to fix my problem, I began doing exercises for those muscles for flexibility and strength gains. For my exercises in detail I began standing for a long period of time and would flex my gluteus maximus muscles and keep them tight for a period of time to strengthen them which would be for a few minutes. This fixed the slight curve in my lower back. The next step I performed was the same as with my gluteus maximus muscles but for my abs which helped keep a good posture naturally without thinking about my posture deviations and how to fix them. I could now begin to stand naturally with a good posture. The last step I did was stand against a wall with my back and neck flat against the wall and I would press my tongue against the top of my mouth to

Archaeologists destroy the sites they excavate. This has been one of the major criticisms that has been lobbed at archaeologists for years. When archaeologists excavate a site, the common practice of digging and removing artifacts is sometimes frowned upon by the communities in the surrounding area. In the 1800’s people’s views of indigenous communities where reprehensible to say the lest “American Indians were held to be inferior to civilized men in order to rationalize the seizure of Indian lands, and that eventually, racial myths grew to supplant any other myths about Indians as a justification for waging war on Indians and violating their treaties.” (Watkins 2000: 6) This trend continued into the 1900’s, but the degradation that indigenous and to some extant non-indigenous communities have experienced is still present to this day, but it is not as prevalent as it was in the past. The things that were decimated where Indigenous graves, sacred places, and cultural materials. The practice of looting grave goods has been a problem since Europeans first came to the Americas “The looting of the Native American past began with the very earliest European presence in North America, starting earlier than many would think.”

I set out to find a place to begin my observations, not knowing what to fully expect, what I may find. So I decided to look around at what is close to my home that isn’t a place I frequent or have even visited at all. Then it came to me, the Starbucks that is only about a mile away is a perfect place for me to observe subjects that I would consider different from myself, seeing as how I consider such obscene prices for coffee ridiculous. Starbucks is a very popular chain of coffee vendors that describe their product as more about quality than what Americans are used to in typical coffee joints.

As our society evolved, my vision of the world has been changing drastically. The biggest change occurred when I came to the U.S. This happened due to fact, that in America I have more opportunities of being in contact with the ever changing technology. Even though, I came to America with a master’s degree technologically, I was behind, because in Mexico, the country in which I grew and was educated, used to have very limited technological advancements for the whole population. Therefore, I learned in America how to use the Internet, e-mailing, texting, and using a smart phone. Of course, Mexico is different today. As a consequence, when I lived in Mexico, my world view was limited to the issues, routines, and traditions of that country. Then, I came to America, believing that this country was genuinely multicultural. Fortunately, dealing with different cultures was not an issue, because my Mexican family is racially mixed, and I learned to appreciate different cultures, since my early childhood.

For my first experience with ethnographic fieldwork, I observed a superbowl party that began at 5 p.m. on Sunday, February 5, at the VFW Hall, which is located on 1490 Hwy 594 in Monroe, LA. I started my observations at 6 p.m. when about 30 people arrived and ended at 7:30 p.m. I was not very lowkey due to the people being family, so they thought I was just doing homework. I observed a group of male and female African Americans between the ages 21 and 30 that consisted of seven people. During my observation, I saw the two-culture approach and the psychoanalytic theory comes into play while noticing the different conversational styles and altercasting performed between the members.

Anthropologist in the 1980s influenced many questions about the scientific goals and orientation. The new form of postmodern anthropology, which is an anti-science perspective that rejects the idea of universal knowledge and focuses on culture as an open-ended stress the examination of how ethnographies are written (Sidky, 2004). The known postmodernists, George Marcus and Michael Fischer, inaugurated a new vision of anthropology in a “crisis of representation.” The message Marcus created belief that scientific paradigms failed and were obsolete, and now anthropology is a literary enterprise. Anthropology involves both experimental edge and a deep conservative hinterland. Many anthropologists were resistant to the idea based on their past concepts

In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. In more modern times, their goal has become much more local, in focusing on human problems and issues within the societies they live.