More Problems With Culture 1. The culture concept has been used and misused This notion has traveled around the world it can be considered one of Anthropology's great successes b. Culture has also been distorted 1. Assumptions that cultures have clear boundaries
1. Strength and weakness of anthropology: Anthropologists are often swayed by a single key case a. Weakness in that this is an obviously inadequate sample. No way of knowing if typical or how typical b. Strength in that rich analysis, really can tell you a lot
1. As an organizing principle for life a. We tend to think of kin as something natural biological or as having some basis beyond culture i. For example, children reuniting with birth parents b. Kinship is actually highly variable and artificial from one culture to the next
More On The Nuer 1. Ghost Marriage: a woman is married to a dead man a. Among the Nuer, this kind of marriage is almost as frequent as marriage to a living man b. A living man is found to physically father a child for the dead man. TO understand this, one must distinguish between:
Anthropology and Moral Relativism Two stories: In 1960's and 70's a prominent Harvard psychologist named Jerome Bruner decided that it would be a good idea to expose young people to some of the concepts of social science, so he developed a curriculum called \Man: A Course
The ethnographic reality behind these concepts Potlatch 1. The Culture a. North West coast cultural area is mostly in Canada b. Whole series of related groups all the way up to Alaska C. Fascinating area
