Week 2 — One Bell, Six Items: Reading Culture Before Judging It — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 2 of the term — read culture in its own terms before judging it, and explain the culture concept to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met culture as a whole learned way of life, its five characteristics, norms, values, and symbols, ethnocentrism and the method of cultural relativism, and Miner's Nacirema. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain the culture concept 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. At 8:00 a.m. the market manager rings a hand bell, vendors call out "Bell's rung!", and the first sales begin within a minute. Two vendors once disagreed about whether bagging a regular's order before the bell "counts" as selling early: one said a regular is the exception; the other said the rule is the rule. A friend hears you are studying culture and says, "Culture means opera and museums, and cultural relativism means anything goes." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers about Tylor's definition, Miner's article, Malinowski's book, and the market.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. Tylor's 1871 definition of culture names 6 items, knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom, and 1 of them is art. How many of the named items are not the arts?
2. At the running fieldwork site, two shoppers were already waiting at 7:40 a.m., and the market manager rings the bell at 8:00 a.m. Using 60 minutes in an hour, how many minutes passed between 7:40 and the bell?
3. Tylor's definition of culture appeared in 1871, and Miner's article "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" appeared in 1956. How many years after Tylor's definition did Miner's article appear?
4. Tylor's definition of culture appeared in 1871, and Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific appeared in 1922. How many years after Tylor's definition did Malinowski's book appear?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: explain why culture is a whole learned way of life rather than the arts alone, and name one everyday habit of your own that Tylor's phrase "any other capabilities and habits" would cover.
• Problem 2: name the bell as a symbol and the wait as a norm, offer one possible value behind the norm (labeled as a reading to test, not a fact), and explain what the two vendors' disagreement about bagging a regular's order shows about culture.
• Problem 3: describe one of your own daily habits the way Miner described the Nacirema, as if it belonged to an unfamiliar people, and say what ethnocentric judgment the exercise exposes.
• Problem 4: explain how reading Tylor's word "man" as the period's usage for all people shows that culture is changing.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks culture means opera and museums, and that cultural relativism means anything goes. Write a 3–5 sentence message that says what culture means to an anthropologist, explains why cultural relativism is a method for describing a practice before judging it rather than "anything goes", and names one limit, including that the market is illustrative and that a possible value behind its bell rule is a reading to test, not a fact. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who says good manners are the same everywhere. Model answer: "Manners are part of culture, the whole way of life people learn from those around them, so they differ from place to place. A guest who finds a host's table manners odd is starting from their own habits, which everyone does at first. An anthropologist would describe the manners in the host's own terms before judging them. That does not mean anything goes; it means understanding comes first, and a careful judgment can follow."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values in the problems 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 culture means, why cultural relativism is a method rather than "anything goes", and one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values 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 opening routine 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.

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