Week 1 — One Market, Four Questions: A First Look Through the Anthropological Perspective — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 1 of the term — take a first look at one place the way an anthropologist does, and explain the field to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met anthropology as the study of humans across place and time, its four subfields, and the anthropological perspective of holism, comparison, and fieldwork. In this assignment you work four short problems about the running fieldwork site, interpret each one, and explain the field to someone who has it wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market constructed for this course, not a real place. It has 24 stalls and is open one morning a week, from 8:00 a.m. to noon. The market manager assigns stall locations, collects a weekly stall fee, and rings the opening bell; the vendors' association votes on the market's rules. A friend hears you are studying it and says, "Anthropologists dig up dinosaurs in faraway places. Why would one look at a farmers' market?" Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers about the market.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. The running fieldwork site opens at 8:00 a.m. and closes at noon, which is 12 on the clock. How many hours is it open each market day?
2. The running fieldwork site has 24 stalls, and each stall is open for the market's 4 hours. How many stall-hours of selling does the market hold each market day?
3. On a first look you watch 1 of the running fieldwork site's 24 stalls. How many of its stalls do you not watch?
4. The running fieldwork site holds 96 stall-hours of selling each market day, and an observer can watch one stall for the full 4 hours on each visit. How many market-day visits would it take to watch all 96 stall-hours once?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: take your first look. Name what you notice first at the market, and one thing a first-time visitor would not know there.
• Problem 2: write one question about the market from each of the four subfields (cultural, linguistic, archaeological, and biological anthropology), and say how applied anthropology runs across them.
• Problem 3: use holism to link at least two parts of the market that watching one stall would miss, such as the stall assignments, the fee, the rules, or the bell. Then compare the market with one other place where people buy food, describing both and ranking neither.
• Problem 4: explain why one visit is a first look rather than fieldwork, and set long-term fieldwork against the "armchair" approach of comparing customs from other people's reports.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend asked why an anthropologist would look at a farmers' market at all. Write a 3–5 sentence message that says what anthropology studies, explains why an ordinary market is fair ground for it, and names one limit, including that the market is illustrative and that one first look cannot tell you everything about it. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who asks why anyone would study a hospital waiting room. Model answer: "Anthropology is the study of people, everywhere, including in ordinary places close to home. A waiting room has its own unwritten rules about where to sit, how loudly to talk, and who speaks to the front desk, and newcomers often break them without knowing. Looking at how those habits fit together, and comparing them with a waiting room somewhere else, shows that they are one arrangement among several. One afternoon of watching would only be a first look, so an anthropologist would come back many times before saying much."

Use that pattern for the farmers' market, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the market's stalls and hours without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the friend, saying what anthropology studies, why a farmers' market is fair ground for it, and one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the stalls and hours you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the market's parts with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the market only as the course describes it, and do not borrow a custom or a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com