Culture A set of learned behaviour and ideas that human beings acquire as members of a society. Human beings use culture to adapt to and to transform the world in which they live.

Main characteristics of culture: Learned Shared Patterned Adaptive Symbolic Evolving

Learned: We have no instincts that automatically protect us and help us find food and shelter. We need to learn these things from people around us.

Shared: Culture is not an individual characteristic, it is a social and collective resource.

Patterned: Related cultural beliefs and practices show up repeatedly in different areas of social life.

Adaptive: We don’t have a highly specific genetic programming for survival like other animals do. We depend on culture (our learned responses) to adapt ourselves to our environment and to survive as biological organisms.

Symbolic: Symbols are things that represent or stand for something else, for example, when a material object represents something abstract, e.g.: “The limousine is a symbol of his wealth and authority.” Because it is symbolic, culture is what makes our actions intelligible, understandable by others.

Evolving: Cultures change through time. This is because members of different social groups are constantly modifying their heritage.

Anthropologists: Study human culture and human diversity.

Film: Cannibal Tours Who? Dennis O’Rouke When? 1987 Where? Sepik River in Papua New Guinea What to look for? Consider the propensity of tourists to photograph indigenous populations, to capture, as it were, ‘evidence’ of seemingly ‘exotic’ peoples and cultures

Get together in groups of 4 and compare notes about the film. Choose a Recording Secretary to take notes about what people say (record people’s full names on the page). These will be handed to me at the end of class, and will count toward participation points (today’s class is only a rehearsal). The Recording Secretary should make sure that everybody has a chance to speak.

“If one observes the movements of a human being in possession of a camera…the impression given is of someone lying in wait. Like the act of stalking performed by a hunter…” (adapted from Flusser, 2000:33).

Anthropology: Comparative Evolutionary Holistic

Comparative In order to generalize about human nature, human society and the human past, anthropology considers the similarities and differences from the widest possible range of human societies.

Evolutionary We place our observations about human nature, human society and the human past in a temporal framework, taking into consideration change over time.

Holistic Anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about human beings and their activities at the highest and most inclusive level. Holism is a perspective on the human condition that assumes that mind and body, individuals and society, and people and the environment interpenetrate and even define one another.

Idealism and Materialism Perspectives that reduce our understanding of human reality emphasizing one aspect of our nature at the expense of the other.