Week 8 · Readings & resources

Week 8 — Readings & Resources

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Your primary reading is Chapter 8 (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 40–53 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 (16–20 min total)

① Reviewing the first half: subfields, culture, and language

Chapter 8, Section “Map the discipline: the four subfields” · Session 1, Segment 1, “One distinction per week” · Remember: each of Weeks 1 to 7 asks you to keep one distinction straight, starting with the four subfields and language versus communication.

What Is Cultural Anthropology? — Kinkella Teaches Archaeology — a short, lively explainer from an archaeologist on the subfield that studies living people; as you watch, name the other three subfields it sets cultural anthropology beside. Use it while completing the Week-8 module overview. (video, 4 min) (captions: creator)
Does language shape how we think? Linguistic relativity & linguistic determinism -- Linguistics 101 — NativLang — an animated linguistics explainer on the debate over whether language shapes thought; as you watch, sort each claim it describes into the strong form, which the evidence does not support, or the weak form, which has limited support. (video, 3 min) (captions: creator)

② From a ladder to lenses: how the discipline's ideas changed

Chapter 8, Section “Trace how the discipline's ideas changed: five lenses” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Five lenses on culture” · Remember: unilineal evolutionism ranked whole societies and was rejected, while the later schools are lenses that each show something.

Early Evolutionary Social Anthropology — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — a reference-work section on the nineteenth-century school that compared customs from travelers' and missionaries' reports; read it to see the armchair method and the critics' charge that its stages were ethnocentric. Its opening mentions a question about how marriage developed: stop here before any claim about the origins of marriage or family; next week takes up kinship and descent. (reading, 5–9 min)
Pioneers Of Progressive Anthropology, Wade Davis — The Long Now Foundation — a short talk excerpt in which one anthropologist argues his own view of how Boas and his students challenged the era's ideas of social progress; as you watch, name the lens it describes and say what it asks of a culture's own history. If the talk treats cultural relativism as every culture being equally "correct", as the talk's own description does, keep the course's line between relativism as a method and moral relativism. (video, 5 min) (captions: creator)
A Glossary of Anthropology — Discover Anthropology — an outreach glossary from a professional body for anthropologists; read the entries for Functionalism and Structural-Functionalism, then say which one asks what a practice does for the people now and which asks how institutions hold together. This builds on Week 5's work comparing how societies make a living: read the Gatherer-Hunter and Pastoralism entries too, and notice each strategy is set beside the others, not ranked. (reading, 4–7 min)
Theorists In Education, Clifford Geertz — Teaching and Learning Central — a brief summary of Geertz's work and how researchers outside anthropology use it; as you watch, listen for culture treated as meanings to be read, then restate thick description in your own words. (video, 3 min) (captions: creator)

③ Anthropology now: working with communities as partners

Chapter 8, Section “Read the kula through each lens” · Session 2, Segment 5, “The kula through each lens” · Remember: present-day practice asks whose voices shape the account and how the people whose practice it is take part in telling it.

What We Do, Cultural Anthropology Program — U.S. National Park Service — a short government page on the work of cultural anthropologists in national parks; read the paragraphs headed Research and Consult, and find the sentence about making people partners in the process. (reading, 2–4 min)
Community-Based Access and Care at the Field Museum — Society for American Archaeology — a museum collections worker explains how staff work with the living communities whose heritage the objects are, arranging visits and sharing research; as you watch, list two moves that treat a community as a partner. (video, 6 min) (captions: creator)
The Voice Of Anthropology Must Be Spoken To Be Heard, Wade Davis — The Long Now Foundation — a two-minute talk excerpt arguing that anthropology's ideas matter most when they are shared with a wide public; as you watch, connect it to the public side of present-day practice. (video, 2 min) (captions: creator)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

Relativism, Cultural relativism — online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — a reference-work entry; read only section 4.1, which traces cultural relativism to Boas and later anthropologists. Notice that it treats cultural relativism as a philosophical position, while this course uses it as a method: describe before you judge. (reading, 6–10 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.

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