Introduction to this text
This pressbook is organized to accompany my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology classes. It is largely based on the American Anthropological Association’s Perspectives text. Here, it is organized around three units in the course. Each unit corresponds to a content exam. I have framed this text in a way that is well-suited to my particular lecture design and course approach. I previously used many wonderful introduction texts, that have inspired me. While using the various texts, I would similarly reorder to build toward some of the topics that I feel are central to current interests and scholarship in cultural anthropology. These were the topics that I really wanted for students to leave the class feeling excited and knowledgeable about.
The first unit is organized to get students thinking about the basics of the field of anthropology. It includes a history of thought and scholarship. It also introduces students to the concept of holism in American anthropology, and the primary subfields in the field. Fieldwork in cultural anthropology and the culture concept are introduced. In the classroom, the first lecture is called “Anthropology, Culture, and Fieldwork”, and it spans the first three to four weeks of the semester. In many textbooks, the content of the first lesson blends what is typically presented as chapters 1-3. To help split the content-load across the semester, I include Kinship, Marriage, and Family for this unit. This helps to bring the early conceptual information to a basic application topic. Students seem to appreciate that it gives them a break from historically situating the field and invites opportunities to build personal connections to the course content. This moves this content forward in the semester (compared to other courses that might put this toward the end of the semester) and helps students to understand underlying social structures, while using
The second unit is intended to encourage students to think critically about social models. It emphasizes economies, subsistence and foodways, and political integration. Classroom lessons build on these ideas, scaffolding them for students. In the classroom, I encourage students to think critically about the assumptions that they have about social contexts and social models. My goal is to encourage them to keep thinking beyond the models with the recognition that all things change. How people understand and organize their thoughts about others is necessarily influenced by their own social histories and experiences. We are critical of many of the models that we discuss, but we carefully distinguish the criticisms that we apply. Why do we take a critical stance in the introduction course that is largely designed to introduce these topics and build a base for future coursework? I found that some students exited the course had a difficult time separating social models and contextualizing them historically. Some would incorrectly assume that the 19th century evolutionist perspectives were perspectives that are valued in research today (or recently, like the 1990’s). This is not entirely their fault as these models seem to appear in various forms outside the field of anthropology, but are presented as recently contemporary social theories. We critically evaluate popular media, such as the opening scene to the Pixar film Home, and recognize it as a scathing, though humorous, assessment of the social sciences–especially as practiced in the early days of social fieldwork. We also spend time unpacking a popular Kurzgesagt video that includes many anthropological theories in a less than 10 minute overview of human evolution and social development history. Some of the theories embedded have been long refuted and do not represent current trends in social approaches to anthropology.
The third unit is all about identity. We discuss some of the most central topics of the semester at the end as students generally have built the skills necessary to apply a culturally relativistic understanding of them by this point of the semester. Specifically, these include the topics of religion and belief systems, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex, and sexuality. Students have learned that the goal of anthropology in these discussions is not about judgment but of understanding and contextualization. Central to this unit is a firm understanding of cultural constructive processes. When centered around this, students tend to recognize the role that our histories and social experiences play in building and communicating identities, not just as individuals, but as social group members. I lean into Clifford Geertz’s cultural systems approach, and include a discussion of Talal Asad’s social action emphasis before we delve in to various aspects of how people build and communication who they perceive themselves to be with other people in a dynamic social context of experience. At the end of this unit, students frequently share a profound shift in how they consider concepts of identity. They understand that my goal is not to change their individual views on any of these specific topics, but rather to help reveal some of the social histories and contexts that produced rigid understandings of flexible social structures.
The fourth unit contains chapters that I rotate materials from or integrate them into other sections. For example, when discussing ethnic identity, I like to discuss language and dialects. It pairs well with Wade Davis’s TEDTalk Dreams from endangered cultures. This can be used to open several discussions, such as using language as a proxy for social diversity, concepts of salvage ethnography, and discussions about social power. Also, with the health and medicine chapter, I like to integrate it into discussions of religion and cultural relativism. I frame the entire course with globalization and localization processes, but in a breakout discussion, students discuss these topics more fully and as social processes. In sum, I see value in keeping them as separate chapters, but will pull examples from them into other discussions.
