Modern American Anthropology By Franz Boas

Boas emigrated from Germany to the United States believing America to be a politically ideal country; he began to study the Native Americans of the North West Coast such as the Haida, Kwakitul and the Bella Coola. The first American article Boas published dealt with concepts of language pertaining to the that of the Eskimo people who were perceived to be uncivilized in the manner of language, Boas

In this quote, Fields argues that Race is not biological nor is it an imaginable concept; it is an ideology that was created to justify slavery and social class. It is simply unnatural to be racist, but when there are explanations

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

Along these lines, Boas recognized the importance of reaching into the past to create and preserve the present, again setting himself ahead of the rest of his contemporaries. The idea of cultural whole is that every culture was a complete system. He felt

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.

For that reason, professor Cohen also states that race does not control behavior like people say it does. He explains that race does not correlate to genes or skin color that control differences in “behavior of intelligence among human groups.” He then talks about culture and the way it works. In the article, it mentions that culture structures “our behavior, thoughts, perceptions, values, goals and cognitive processes.” Professor Cohen also says that students should be taught about significance of culture and revive the anthropological concept of “cultural relativism.” He claims that relativism means that people must look at what other people are doing and try to comprehend their behavior towards it before we judge it. The article concludes that teaching race in the form of “biological variation” results in the promotion of racism than when you teach it in the “cultural relativism” form.

“The Indian presence precipitated the formation of an American identity” (Axtell 992). Ostracized by numerous citizens of the United States today, this quote epitomizes Axtell’s beliefs of the Indians contributing to our society. Unfortunately, Native Americans’ roles in history are often categorized as insignificant or trivial, when in actuality the Indians contributed greatly to Colonial America, in ways the ordinary person would have never deliberated. James Axtell discusses these ways, as well as what Colonial America may have looked like without the Indians’ presence. Throughout his article, his thesis stands clear by his persistence of alteration the Native Americans had on our nation. James Axtell’s bias delightfully enhances his thesis, he provides a copious amount of evidence establishing how Native Americans contributed critically to the Colonial culture, and he considers America as exceptional – largely due to the Native Americans.

Native American, or American Indians, have a rich culture comprised of struggle, strife and success. For this paper, i will discuss the Native American Culture and it's history.

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is a nursery rhyme that can be heard repeated incessantly by elementary school students in America. It is used to help them remember when Christopher Columbus made his journey to the New World. Something that is conveniently left out of this nursery rhyme is how Columbus lead to the genocide of over a million Native Americans. Columbus is a villain that lead to the genocide of so many Native Americans. Howard Zinn and Arthur Schlesinger both evaluate Columbus’s role in the genocide of the Native Americans, however Zinn provides much better evidence, thus making his article the better of the two.

Another interesting finding from John Howard Griffin was that white children did not necessarily share their parents racial beliefs. This offers proof that racism is not a part of human nature, but rather a by-product of the human nature of the fear of the unknown. Since the white person was unfamiliar with the black man, there was a sense of fear of the black man. Racism is merely a defense mechanism passed down from parent to child.

Roughly 16,000- 40,000 years ago a group of nomadic people known as the Paleo-Indians who are the ancestors of the Native Americans followed the herds of animals from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge called Beringia that connected Asia to North America (Mintz & McNeil, 2013). The land bridge that was used has been covered by water due to the rise of the Bering and Chukchi Seas (United States National Parks Services [NPS], 2014). The timeline for this journey has been in question because nothing was recorded so archeologists have an approximate time this took place. By the year 8,000 B.C.E these nomadic people spread and settled into different tribes throughout North and South America

However, this ought not to lead us to be suspicion about race, i.e. that we can 't have any target information about race. We can realize what race is and how it functions paying

In Barbara Anderson’s book, First Fieldwork: The Misadventures of an Anthropologist, she discusses how as a graduate student she went to a small Danish town called Taarnby to do an ethnographic study of the community. When she went to Denmark, she took her family with her: Thor her husband and Katie her daughter. This book talks about the many difficulties and problems that an untried and inexperienced anthropologist can face, even though some of it is “improved upon”.

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?

In Americanah by Adichie Ngozi Chimamanda, the characters Ifemelu and Dike undergo two different experiences of race in America. Ifemelu, coming from Nigeria, has never witnessed what it means to be “black” because in Nigeria she is simply Nigerian; there are no grey areas with race there. Her cousin Dike, on the other hand, has only experienced “blackness” in America because he is born into it. Throughout the novel, Ifemelu struggles to assimilate because she is trying to understand race in America. While, Dike is seemingly numb to any social injustices that occur to him because he has grown up around it. Using Ifemelu and Dike, Adichie highlights how the realities of racial inequality force Non American Black people to confront their expectations surrounding their immigration; but ultimately their confrontation often results in a major loss of identity in hopes of dealing with reaching the ideal American dream.