Table of Content
UNIT 1 Anthropological Perspectives Unit Overview 1.Before: The Sixties, Conrad Phillip Kottak,Assault on Paradise,McGraw-Hill, 2006 An anthropologist's firstfieldworkis especially challenging since it involves living in a strange environment with people whose culture is stranger still. Yet, as Phillip Kottak describes such an experience in a small community in Brazil, the reward is a greaterunderstanding of and appreciation for another culture. 2.Eating Christmas in the Kalahari, Richard Borshay Lee,Natural History,December 1969 Anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee gives an account of the misunderstanding and confusion that often accompanycross-cultural experience. In this case, he violated a basic principle of the !Kung Bushmen's social relations-food sharing. 3.Tricking and Tripping, Claire E. Sterk,Tricking and Tripping: Prostitution in the Era of AIDS,Social Change Press,2000 As unique as Claire E. Sterk's report onprostitutionmay be, she discusses issues common to anthropologists wherever they conductfieldwork: How does one build trusting relationships with informants and what are theethical obligationsof an anthropologist toward them? 4.Anthropology and Counterinsurgency, Montgomery McFate,Military Review,March/April 2005 Countering the insurgency in Iraq requires cultural and social knowledge of the adversary. Yet, none of the elements of U.S. national power diplomatic, military, intelligence, or economic-explicitly take culture of the adversary into account in the formation or execution of policies. This gap in knowledge of culture has a simple cause-the absence of anthropology within the national-security establishment. UNIT 2 Culture and Communication Unit Overview 5.Whose Speech Is Better?, Donna Jo Napoli,Language Matters: A Guide to Everyday Questions About Language,Oxford University Press, 2003 Although we cannot explicitly state therules of our language, we do choose to follow different rules in different contexts. Depending on the situation, we manipulate every aspect of language, from simple differences inpronunciationandvocabularyto the more complicated changes inphrasingand thesentence structure. 6.Do You Speak American?, Robert MacNeil,USA Today Magazine,January 2005 It is a common assumption that the mass media is making all Americans speak in a similar manner.Linguistspoint out, however, that while some national trends in language are apparent,regional speech differencesare not only thriving, but in some places they are becoming even more distinctive. 7.Fighting for Our Lives, Deborah Tannen,The Argument Culture,Random House, 1998 In America today, apervasive warlike tone seems to prevail in public dialogue. The prevailing belief is that there are only two sides to an issue and opposition leads to truth. Often, however, an issue is more like a crystal, with many sides, and the truth is in the complex middle, not in theoversimplified extremes. 8.I Can't Even Open My Mouth, Deborah Tannen,I Only Say This Because I Love You,Random House, 2001 Since family members have a long, shared history, what they say in conversation-themessages-echo with meanings from the past&ast
