Week 2 — Readings & Resources

Your primary reading is Chapter 2 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 71–83 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (16–21 min total)

• Culture — Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology
• What is Cultural Relativism? Definition, Strengths, and Criticisms — Armchair Academics

① What culture is, and where the word came from

Chapter 2, Section “Define culture: Tylor's complex whole” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Tylor's definition of culture” · Remember: culture is a whole learned, shared way of life, and art is only one part of it.

• Primitive Culture, Chapter I — Wikisource — the opening page of the first chapter of Tylor's book, where the definition the chapter quotes appears in the first paragraph; read that paragraph only, because the rest of the chapter sorts societies into stages, a view the discipline later rejected. (reading, 2–4 min)
• Culture — Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology — an encyclopedia entry by an anthropologist on what the discipline means by culture and why the idea is argued over; read the Introduction and the section headed Culture contested. Stop here before the section on meanings and methodologies; next week takes up how anthropologists study culture in the field. (reading, 10–15 min)
• Culture: 25 Concepts in Anthropology — Nicholas Herriman — an anthropologist's short talk on culture as what people learn, share, and take for granted, including how it is passed on; listen for how the talk describes enculturation. (video, 12 min) (captions: automatic)
• Making Life Richer: The Importance of Sharing Culture at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival — Smithsonian Folklife — participants and visitors at a festival of living traditions talk about why sharing culture matters. This builds on Week 1's work with comparison: notice how setting one tradition beside another helps visitors see their own. (video, 6 min) (captions: creator)

② Norms, values, and symbols

Chapter 2, Section “Read norms, values, and symbols: from the dinner table to the market bell” · Session 1, Segment 3, “Norms, values, and symbols” · Remember: a norm tells people how to behave, a value says what matters, and a symbol stands for something by agreement.

• Symbols, Values & Norms: Crash Course Sociology #10 — CrashCourse — a fast, illustrated tour of symbols, values, and norms from a neighboring social science; compare its definitions with the chapter's, and skip the part on language shaping thought. Use it while working through the Week-2 module overview. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
• The Anthropology of Deviance: An Introduction — AnthroDorphins — an anthropologist explains what happens when people live outside shared norms, and asks whether what counts as breaking a norm differs from one setting to another. (video, 13 min) (captions: automatic)

③ Describing before judging, and the familiar made strange

Chapter 2, Section “Judge later: ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and where the method stops” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism” · Remember: describe a practice in its own terms first; relativism is a method, not permission for anything.

• What is Cultural Relativism? Definition, Strengths, and Criticisms — Armchair Academics — a short video essay that defines cultural relativism, sketches where the idea came from, and sets out the main criticisms and the replies to them. (video, 6 min) (captions: automatic)
• Human rights — Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology — an encyclopedia entry on how anthropologists have argued about relativism and human rights; read the Introduction, which describes the American Anthropological Association's statements on human rights. (reading, 4–6 min)
• Body Ritual of the Nacirema (Spoiler Alert) — Giana Cicchelli — a sociology teacher's short talk to her class that gives away the twist in Miner's article and says why he wrote it that way, as a warning about describing other cultures as strange; read the article first if you want the surprise, then notice how the talk links it to ethnocentrism. (video, 3 min) (captions: creator)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

• Moral Relativism, Descriptive Moral Relativism — online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — a philosophy reference entry; read only the section on descriptive moral relativism, which explains how the claim that moral views differ relates to the stronger claim that no moral judgment holds across cultures, and skip the technical sections after it. (reading, 5–8 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com