Throughout this sixteen week course, I have learned a lot about anthropology and its subfields, more than I ever could have imagined. Some of the most important just being definitions, like culture, which is the learned and shared things that people think, do, and have. Before this class I would’ve never been able to tell you that, or anyone for that matter. Another thing I learned were all the fields of anthropology, them being archeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, and applied anthropology. I learned most about five things, which I will be focusing on in this essay. Those five things are anthropology itself, human evolution, culture, language, and and human expansion across the globe.
Anthropology is the examination of human behaviour. This means the field is made up of what it means to take human ranges from this examination of society and cultural relations, to human life and development, to languages, to music, creation, and architecture, and to vestiges of human habitation. It regards much interesting doubts as how people’s behaviour modifications change, how people feel about this reality, and how people from remote components of this globe and dissimilar cultures are different and the same, how the human species has evolved over millions of years, and how individuals understand and operate successfully in distinct cultural settings.
Anthropology includes four extensive fields—cultural anthropology, sciences, personal anthropology, and anthropology. Each of these four areas teaches distinctive skills, , e.g., applying theories, using research methodologies, developing and testing hypotheses, and producing broad sets of information. Anthropology is such a broad field and has something for almost everyone, which is what I really love about it. I can use the information I have learned to help me in my future field of forensic anthropology.
Our society is culturally diverse. It is made up of families representing many different cultures. Successive generations blend these cultural characteristics into their current way of life. They celebrate their individual cultural backgrounds while also respecting the many things they have in common with society as a whole. It is interesting to note ways in which a family’s cultural heritage may influence family relationships. For example, some families are influenced by cultures in which family members prefer not to show their affection for one another outwardly.
In contrast, families from other cultures may like to show their affection openly. Wherever anthropologists have respected conventional cultures and gave attention to kids , too as adults, they’ve observed two civilizations, the adults’ society and the children’s society. These two cultures, Certainly, are not entirely separate of one another. They move and affect one another; and kids, as they mature, gradually forget the society of childhood and enter into the society of adulthood.
Children’s cultures may be realized, at least to some level, as study cultures, where kids take out different ways of representing and learn, modify, and develop upon the skills and values of the adult culture. Culture is so unique and is such a personal thing, its different to everyone, which is what makes it really cool. From this class, i’ve learned about tons of different cultures, and this can help me by expanding my knowledge on them and knowing how to respect certain cultures as well.
Human evolution is the evolutionary process that led to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, beginning with the evolutionary history of primates – in particular genus Homo – and leading to the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of the hominid family, the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of traits such as human bipedalism and language, as well as interbreeding with other hominins, which indicate that human evolution was not linear but a web. This almost ties directly into human expansion.
Since the dawn of human society, continuous demand of human expansion made the army of adventurers to find new lands and new paths to travel across the unknown terrain. Those earlier periods of consideration proved to be instrumental in the coming, and they paved the way for all Those emerging explorers that thought strange lands but beyond reach. As we look back into past, the most obvious period for these explorers was without the doubt the period between 15th and 17th century, when European nations started exploring the continents of Americas.
Nevertheless, those discoveries could never be created without the efforts of the old explorers from this nearly 2000 years ago. However, as the humanity spread further, united multi-national humanity ceased to exist beyond its borders. Since the UNE controlled only a single star cluster, the one in the center of human expansion, it became boxed in from all sides by national empires with no room to grow and cut off from the newly emerging nations on the fringe of the expansion bubble.
The first wave of national empires surrounding the Cradle cluster (as the homeworld cluster came to be known) included the virtually unopposed (or universally opposed, depending on the point view) English speaking Merico (an ironic amalgam of former United States of America and Commonwealth), mutually very competitive Asian empires of Nihon (former Japan and Korea) and Zong (former China and Vietnam), equally opposed Arabic Salaam and colorful Indian Bharagana, and finally, two Slavic empires, also mutually at odds, Czek for western Slavs and Rhus for eastern ones. As much as these directions make any sense in space, anyway.
For my final point, I will be talking about language. This scientific study of text is named linguistics. Questions concerning this philosophy of words, , e.g., whether languages will present education, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers , e.g., Rousseau have argued that words originated from emotions while others like Kant have taken that it arose from logical and rational thinking.
20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that belief is actually the learning of words. Leading numbers in sciences consider Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky, one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar. Nevertheless, different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.
Cultures such as the United States or Western Europe value self-expression and verbal precision. We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind. On the other hand Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps’ and “maybe’ are used much more frequently than “yes’, “no’ or “for sure’. In Japanese culture precise articulation is appreciated much less than speaking between the lines or being understood without words; therefore the language is used quite differently.