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How does the identification of cultural universals impact our understanding of what it

means to be human? How does the search for universals help us better understand

human cultural behavior? What examples from your own culture can illustrate the ideas

that our behaviors are impacted by our culture more than our biology? Use terminology

from the text and ideas from your own life to support your answers.

Cultural universals suggest that all human beings have basic things in common. This

helps to define what it means to be human for some, but the cultural norms listed in our

text just confuse the issue for me because most of them were not exclusive to human

beings. The text identifies myths, body adornment, division of labor, kinship systems,

and fear of snakes ( , 2010, 1.3) as cultural universals. Firstly, if animals have myths,

how would we know? Decorator crabs adorn themselves with sea anemones to fend

off predators (Mizejewski, 2010). Hermit crabs have also been known to adorn

themselves with vintage snail shells. Ants and bees both have a complex labor divisionsystem, and ants build living structures equivalent to cities in proportion to their body

sizes. Anyone who has ever seen a mouse fed to a snake can make the case for other

animals fear of snakes. One of my guy friends has a huge boa that he feeds two live

mice to about once a week. One week I was over his place and kept hearing a strange

scrabbling and thumping sound. When we went to check it out, we discovered that the

snake had eaten the first mouse. After seeing the fate of his companion, the second

mouse was frantically leaping up to the ceiling of the cage and trying to claw his way

out. Eventually, the mouses body weight would become too much for it to support with

its claws, and it would fall to the bottom of the cage, making a thumping sound. The

mouse continued to do this until it literally passed out. From that point onwards, my

friend decided to feed his snake one mouse at a time.

I say all of this to say that it is incredibly difficult to define what it is to be human. Does

the fact that we share many cultural universals with other species undermine our

humanity and distinctness? I dont know. Humanity is more than just the things that

people have in common, it is also their cultural polarity and diversity. Self-introspection

is a universal that most human cultures share, but without a medium for communication,

we cant be sure that animals dont do that as well. The situation with the Japanese

monkeys and the sweet potatoes proves that animals can pass things down along

generational lines, or, in other words, teach their children. Just as animals may exhibit

behavior that is surprisingly human, human beings can display behavior that is

frighteningly animalistic. To me, the Wall Street investment bankers who put profit

before people and crashed our economy are not human, but biologically speaking, they

are. The dehumanization of African Americans within early American society is an

example of how humans can not only behave like animals, but consider other humans

to be animals as well. Yet in a way these two examples are at the very core of what

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makes us human. Animals dont have greed, they dont commit genocide because they

understand on a certain level that they live in balance with other forms of life within their

ecosystem. Animals could never own slaves and rarely do they profit off of the efforts of

other members of their own species. Even when animals profit off of the efforts of other

species, it is generally reciprocal, unlike with humans. Yes, there are many universals

that make us human, and not all of them are good.

References

Mizejewski, D. (25 January 2010). Weird Critter Profile: Decorator Crabs. Animal Planet

Blog. Retrieved from http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_oddities/2010/01/decorator-

crabs.html

Nowak,B., and Laird,P. (2010). Cultural Anthropology. Bridgepoint, 2010.

There are two main approaches to the practice of anthropology: ethnography and

ethnology (Nowak and Laird, 2010, 28). First define each in your own words. Next,

imagine you are a cultural anthropologist studying any culture or cultures that you are

interested in. Which approach would you use in your study and why? What methods

would you use to gather your data? What potential issues may you face while

conducting your fieldwork and how would you deal with them? Make sure you use

proper terminology from your text in your post.

Ethnology is comparing one or many cultures. Ethnography is studying a culture up

close. To me, this suggests that ethnology is more the study of cultures and

ethnography is a study of cultural interaction.

If I was a cultural anthropologist, I would take an ethnographic approach. As a

community organizer by trade, I have learned that individuals directly affected by issues

make the best advocates. In the same way that anthropologists respect the cultures that

they study, organizers have a great deal of respect for the neighborhoods they

organize. In a way, the organizer becomes a participant observer of the community they

work in. We do our preliminary research, using narrative interviews (or 121s) to develop

a power map of the area. We take into consideration political and corporate climate

and how it impacts residents. Above all, organizers, like ethnographers, realize that

relationships are reciprocal. The difference is that an ethnographer does not enter a

particular region for the express purpose of changing the culture, just observing it. It

does seem like some cultural anthropologists do use qualitative data to shape policies

to the benefit of the communities they study. In contrast, a community organizer

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develops a leadership base within a particular geographical area that will address

inequities within their own neighborhoods by confronting the existing power structure.

As an organizer, my primary data comes from narrative interviews. The reason we use

narrative interviews in organizing is because listening to a persons story is the best way

to learn what shapes the person that they are, and to determine if they have similarvalues and self-interest to you. As an ethnographer, I would likely also use narrative

interviews to get to know the culture I was studying. I would also take lots of pictures

and audio recordings to make sure I got an objective view of the culture. I really liked

the picture in the book of the Masai warrior taking a picture of his town. The

anthropologist in that situation got to literally see the mans village through his own

eyes! But even though a picture is worth a thousand words, oral histories and

storytelling are the basis of many non-literate cultures and I think to really understand a

culture, you have to have people that live in it tell you their stories.

Another key difference between organizing and cultural anthropology is that anorganizer generally works with a specific subset of a generally familiar culture, whereas

a cultural anthropologist often does field work with a completely unfamiliar culture. One

challenge of being an anthropologist would be learning different languages. Being able

to communicate in ones native tongue often is the first brick laid on the road to trust. I

learn new languages pretty quickly, but all of the languages Ive ever tried to learn are

either Latin or Germanic languages. I dont think I would do very well with an Asian

language or a character based written language. Im also borderline phobic of roaches. I

used to live in Florida, where they get HUGE cockroaches called palmetto bugs. Once a

palmetto bug was outside my door, and I could not force myself to kill it or to step over

it. I locked myself in my car and had to wait until my roommate came home and killed

the bug to go into my house. I dont think I could sleep in most of the places the authors

of our book did fieldwork. I would be too paranoid about bugs crawling on me while I

slept!

References

Nowak,B., and Laird,P. (2010). Cultural Anthropology. Bridgepoint, 2010.