Visiting Cultural Anthropologist Analysis

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”.

Ethnography tells about a culture and the members that comprise this culture. A definition is the scientific description of the customs and individual people of a culture. The process of doing this assignment allowed me to explore another aspect of a cultural group. I was able to learn extensively about interactions between individuals and how see them as a culture. The group that comprises my ethnography is a cultural group very common to Utah. The culture I focused on was the LDS culture, to be more specific I studied a sub-culture of this group. My subculture was a group of 12 year old adolescents that are a Sunday school class in this culture.

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.

a. Herbicide: a substance that is toxic to plants and is used to destroy unwanted vegetation.

James P. Spradley (1979) described the insider approach to understanding culture as "a quiet revolution" among the social sciences (p. iii). Cultural anthropologists, however, have long emphasized the importance of the ethnographic method, an approach to understanding a different culture through participation, observation, the use of key informants, and interviews. Cultural anthropologists have employed the ethnographic method in an attempt to surmount several formidable cultural questions: How can one understand another's culture? How can culture be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed? What aspects of a culture make it unique and which connect it to other cultures? If

Eating utensils come in numerous forms, with each utensil traditionally associated with specific cultures. Broadly speaking, cutlery has always been the traditional western eating utensil, and is increasingly being adopted globally. Chopsticks are used primarily in Asia. In Indian and certain African and Middle Eastern dining culture, eating utensils are usually replaced by the use of hands instead. In each of these cultures, a “correct” use of eating utensil has emerged, and become central to the respective cultures’ dining etiquette. This raises the question: what happens when an immigrant moves from his or her home country to a new culture that uses a different set of eating utensils? Obviously, the immigrant needs to choose which eating utensil to adopt and I believe that this decision carries considerable significance. For an immigrant, the choice of eating utensils – whether to adopt the eating utensils of the host nation or to retain the use of eating utensils of one’s home country – carries both advantages, by

In addition, Romans had amazing food and dining utensils that they used for their dinner parties and elaborate meals. During Ancient Rome, “Romans waited until the main meal of the day, the cena, (Tingay and Marks 38) to truly eat. The cena came in three courses, the appetizers, the main course, and the secundae mensae. When the food was served, it came with plenty of wine. This was because Romans had two hundred varieties or more from all over the empire. In the cena, “Food was served on dishes. Most were made of glass or pottery, but if the family was very rich there would also be ornate platters of gold and silver (Tingay and Marks 39). The Romans had spoons and knives but they preferred eating with their hands and fingers. As the slaves brought the food out on various dishes they would also pour the wine from the amphorae into a jug for easy pouring during meals. At many of the meals the host would normally have three couches, the summus, medius, and imus. (Top, middle, bottom). “The diners were seated according to their social status” (Tingay and Marks 39). When the guest arrived at the host’s house for the dinner party there would be couches surrounding the tables and musicians, jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and conjurers performing. The hosts hired entertainers to the meal to make it more enjoyable and entertaining. The first course was mainly consisting of salads, seafood, eggs, and mulsum. (Wine sweetened with honey). Next, “the main

In the world of Anthropology, everyday new discoveries are found, additional information is gathered, and worthwhile experiments are being performed. And with each study it is providing people with more answers about themselves and people around the globe.

I chose four different anthropological projects from around the word in which I believe would be best for the Archaeology Conservancy to protect. I ranked these different projects based on quality of work, potential for public use, threatened nature, and heritage importance. I first reviewed the Mosfell Archeological project in Iceland. This area will construct a vivid picture of the human and environmental change in southwestern Ireland. The purpose of this project is to find the prehistory and early history of the Mosfell region. I also looked into the Pylos Regional Archaeological project. This project started in 1990 to look at prehistoric settlements in western Messenia, Greece. The Yaxuna project caught my attention because the

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.

Medical anthropologists are engaged in using and expanding many of anthropology’s core concepts in an effort to understand the human body problem in a different way. What is sickness, how it understood and directly experienced and acted on by sufferers, the social networks and healers and how health related problems beliefs and practices fit with and shaped by encompassing social and cultural systems and contexts (Singer and Baer, 2007).

host. When using chopsticks never tap or drum them on a dish this to is

Cultural Anthropologists view all aspects of human nature in order to generate an accurate representation of society. It is imperative that anthropologists engage themselves in fieldwork in pursuance to increase understanding among people of the world. Anthropologists found that by becoming an active participant rather than an observer, they are more likely to be accepted as a member. By becoming an insider, it allows the anthropologist to accurately view the range of cultural behavior within a society and draw a conclusion based on their findings, which in turn increases understanding among people of the world.

This is done many times throughout the meal. In European style cuts are still made one at a time but the fork stays in the left hand and the knife stays in the right. Taking a drink or getting a bite of bread would be the only time the utensils would need to be put down while dining European style. Soup is dipped from a 12 o’clock position, drug across the rim, and brought to the mouth to sip from the edge of the soup spoon. Between bites the soup spoon can be left in a shallow bowl called a soup plate, but should be placed on the liner if the soup is served in a bowl or cup. When finished with the main course the utensils should be placed in a 10:20 clock position on the plate. In American style dining the knife and fork are close together and parallel, with the tines of the fork up and in the European style the fork tines face down. If a salad course was served and the salad knife was not used it should still be placed on the salad plate when finished. At no time should a used utensil be placed back on the table.

The field of anthropology that I find to be most interesting is anthropological linguistics. Personally, I believe this subdivision is so interesting because it is so diverse and covers so much ground on how our language and others have evolved over time. Ranging from early cave writings, to sign language, to the language and slang we all know and use today, language among not only our cultures but also others have vastly changed and there is proof of this that dates back to ancient times. The mere complexity of our current language is beyond what past civilizations could have even imagined it would come to be. What I find to be very interesting is the fact that even today our upbringing, social class, or cultural norms, can define how we speak. For instance, there are certain slangs or terms that someone may say because they were brought up around people who spoke using that kind of language. While this is true for some, but not all, children of an upper class parents may grow up speaking very formally, and be taught to not use any slang or vulgar words. They continue using this vocabulary further on in life because it is what they were taught to do. This can also be applied to any other social class, or even differ between people from different geographic locations. Linguistics is often learned and adopted from generation to generation and from civilization to civilization.