Thinking Like an Anthropologist

Overview

This exciting new text teases out the common core of the cultural anthropological way of thinking, makes it explicit in a set of eleven questions, and uses those questions to enhance learning. Each question receives treatment in a brief chapter, accompanied by several exercises and classroom demonstrations. The textbook is intended to be accompanied by—and applied to—a reader, a few ethnographies, or a monograph with topical focus such as language, globalization, technology, art, or gender. The eleven questions that organize the text can be applied singly and cumulatively to address the cultures presented in the ethnographies or case studies chosen by each instructor. A comprehensive guide written by John Omohundro assists instructors who adopt this novel approach and suggests numerous examples of ethnographies and readers that would be effective companions for the text.

Table of contents

Chapter 1: What is Culture?
Chapter 2: How Do I Learn About Culture? The Naturalistic Question
Chapter 3: What is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
Chapter 4: Do Other Societies Do Something Like This?
Chapter 5: What Was This Idea or Practice Like in the Past?
Chapter 6: How are Human Biology, Culture, and Environment Interacting?
Chapter 7: What Are the Groups and Relationships?
Chapter 8: What Does That Mean? The Interpretive Question
Chapter 9: What is My Perspective? The Reflexive Question
Chapter 10: Am I Judging This? The Relativistic Question
Chapter 11: What Do the People Say? The Dialogic Question
Afterword: Putting It All Together