Collaborative Anthropology

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.

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.

The American Anthropological Association decided in 2010 to remove the word science from the statement of the long range plan. This decision caused a long standing debate in the anthropological community to reawaken with a forceful start. Different anthropologists claim how removing science allowed more sub- divisions of anthropology to be included under the statement umbrella. Others claim how it diminished the name of what anthropology was as a science. This argument questions how anthropology will thrive or unravel if it moves away from the sciences and into other areas of interest.

Modern Culture instills a misguided perception of why charitable acts are performed. In Alfie Kohn’s article, “ The Wrong Way to Get People to Do the Right Thing,” the author uses research evidence, from newspaper articles, to explain his thesis that rewards and praise promotes charitable acts. This article exposes the sad truth behind the natural tendency for human generosity.

Our memories often time embellish the memories we once had of such great people, places, times, and etc. We live these times up to standard that makes us reminisce, hurt, contemplate and so much more. The power of a photograph has been described to have worth a thousand words, metaphorically meaning of course, that what an image can capture in one instance, something that may not ever be captured through words. For too many centuries we have been without, what many of us now take for granted, the photograph. What we capture in a picture, has much more value than we often time see in our commercials, people, places, they tell a story to the ignorant, paint a picture for blind, give the deaf something to listen to, and so much more.

Once the song was fully memorized I practiced it with the recording accompaniment. I learned when to come in from the piano intro and how long to wait after the different phrases and sections. There were no dynamics for the voice part, so I added them in where I saw fit based on the phrases and lyrics, and was highly influenced by a recording sung by Cecilia Bartoli at the Berliner Philharmoniker with Daniel Barenboim.

If I was on a boat with my mother, wife, and child, and the boat capsized with conditions allowing me to save only one of my three family members from drowning, I would most likely choose to save my child. I won’t speak for my hypothetical, non-existent wife, but I can safely say that my mother would live to resent me and my decision to sacrifice her grandchild (or daughter-in-law) on her behalf. Even if I set my mother’s and wife’s opinion aside, I believe that I would instinctively

Prodinger B, Shaw L & Laliberte Rudman D. (2013). Institutional ethnography: Studying the situated nature of occupation. Journal of Occupational Science, 22(1), 71-81.

For my anthropology participation project I did my field work at a jazz show. For this project I wanted to ask a few basic questions about the jazz music scene. The first one is what is the popularity of jazz as art form? Second, what are the culture benefits for American society received from this art form? Finally what is the important of preserving this form of music? My ideas going in to this project are that jazz music should be preserved and respected, because it is an education art form and American only original music style. I choose this topic for many reasons. The first being my love of jazz music and being I have never been to a local jazz performance. The second is that me as a musician wanted to educate myself on American

The author in After Kinship argues that anthropologists should adopt new ways to study kinship since the innovative practices are both raising new concerns and challenging our old understandings. Anthropologists perceive kinship as non-western phenomena which is strongly intertwined with political and societal structures in which the boundaries between “rule of law” and “rule of nature” are blurred. On the contrary, kinship is believed to be obsolete in the West and reduced to the notion of nuclear family, which is on its part deprived of from any political and societal functions. Family is perceived as separate, domestic and private and rather natural than cultural.

An Applied Anthropologist knows that understanding other people around is necessary in functioning and interacting with others. Applied anthropology benefits humanity by looking at diverse groups and finds the similarities among them. The increasing number of people on earth consistently change because of the influences of other cultures and changes in their environment. Applied anthropology allows for people to have a broad open minded perspective into the unknown misunderstood cultural worlds of other people. They have a perspective on people and cultures different from their own. Anthropological analyze has been turned onto the cultures of today, including urbanized environments like Southern California where many sub cultures thrive

Evolution is a topic that has been thoroughly discussed between religion (creationism) and science ever since Charles Darwin proposed its early theories in 1858 (O’neil, 1998), and to this day these theories are still controversial to some, and never completely agreed upon; moreover, we’ll discover that even though there are many true factors that prove time and again that the theories of adaptation are happening right before our eyes, and research over the last 158 years back the evolutionary scientific theories; there are still some folks that refute science’s evidence as conceivable, and will deem evolution as hogwash arguing their value that God is the world’s sole creator. Throughout this assignment we will discuss where two of the subfields

A cultural anthropologist studies culture by participating in an activity or event and asking questions. They work alongside the people they are studying in order to understand their culture.

Raybeck used most of the techniques on page 71 in Thinking Like an Anthropologist. He established key informants including Yusof and Mat, administered oral surveys to prostitutes, collected kin relations, and mapped the community. He also participated in the night guard (jaga) to learn the layout of the community, get to know his fellow villagers, and perform his civic duty. (26, 54-55, 62, 112)

For instance if one anthropologist were to observe a society, the way he/she interprets the information they are receiving could be different to that of a colleague. Nevertheless if they were to both construe the same data and amalgamate them together, their research and observations would become more reliable and relevant to that of the society. Lassiter suggested that such collaboration between individuals is already natural in the ethnographers’ field, but should be embraced more literally; he stated that collaborative ethnography is “ethnography that builds on the cooperative relationships already present... between ethnographers and informants/consultants” (Lassiter, 2008, page 73). Through having a rapport with someone allows agreements and information to be shared easily. It is important to work with colleagues and informants as it gives a broader set of knowledge, it also allows for the societies point of view and culture to be put across accurately. In Alberto Bursztyn’s book The Praeger handbook of special education (2007, page 180) he describes the transition of collaborative ethnography from anthropology to academia, stating that the use in both areas is important to the study’s “validity, reliability and overall rigor”. Bursztyn also looks at previous team work within anthropological background, mentioning the ‘husband and wife’ teaming of the