Welcome back to ANTH 1002

Ryan Schram

Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

August 7, 2019

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2019/0.2

For those of you just joining the class, welcome to ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world. Yes that's right. This class has changed its name from the Handbook. (The unit code is the same though.)

Like ANTH 1001 (in Sem 1), this class is an introduction to cultural anthropology. We want to help you learn how to think like an anthropologist, and to discover your own relationship to the anthropological way of seeing the world.

Stand up. Stretch. Look around. Greet the people around you.

Say hello, and then ask each other what you think the biggest problems in the world today are, and why.

What did people say?

Cultural anthropology (also known as sociocultural anthropology) is the study of human life and human communities in their diversity. Difference is a fundamental fact of being human. Simply put, there is no single way to be human, and sociocultural anthropologists study the different forms of life that people have created for themselves.

To think like an anthropologist consists of:

• Assuming that people learn how to be who they are.
  • Many, many of the things people do, say, think, feel, and perceive are learned (or “acquired”). People are extraordinarily malleable and adaptable, and thus they absorb the influence of their social environment and their relationships to other people.
• Seeing the larger context for any and every aspect of people's behavior, experiences, thoughts, feelings and conditions.
  • No one is an island. No one is truly an individual. There has never been a person born who was not also a member of a larger community of some kind. Communities are organized by patterns, and people conform to these patterns, and play distinct roles in a community. The way of life we each acquire from our social environment also ensures that we each fit into that environment as a community with its own order.

How many of you have ever learned a second language?

How long does it take to learn a second language?

Do you think you could ever learn to forget your first language? Why or why not?

Socialization is a technical term for a profound idea: We have been assimilated.