INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

traditionally studying non-Western people and cultures.
We need to know anthropological terms. How do we define ethnocentrism? The judging of one
culture by the standards of another. Every culture does it; it is just a matter of degree, from the
extremes of viewing other lifestyles as inferior to one’s own to ethnic cleansing and holocaust.
We can find many examples in the news every day. What is the antidote to ethnocentrism?
Cultural relativity, or judging a culture in its own terms. A newer term, multiculturalism, is
popular these days, but the meaning is different, implying a society made up of many different
cultural traditions. Our Western culture is so obsessed with technology that we judge everyone
by that standard, and those who don’t have all our PalmPilots and cell phones are called
underdeveloped or lesser developed. We have come up with silly abbreviations: LDCs are the
Lesser-Developed Countries, and so on. What is development, exactly? To us it is technology.
Well those folks are still plowing with an ox, so they are more “primitive” than we (even if the
ox makes more sense to them because it is cheap and available). If we defined development in
some other way, would we be the most “advanced” of all? What if we spoke of literary,
architectural, or artistic development? Where would the U.S. be, say, in comparison with India
and its Taj Mahal and thousands of years of beautiful poetry? Let’s throw out those words
“primitive” and “advanced” and just see different cultures as different, perhaps with systems
more or less complex, but not higher or lower, better or worse.
Define emic and etic? They are terms originating from concepts in linguistic anthropology.
Phoneme is the sound that has meaning to the native speaker, while phonetic analysis is the
scientific study of the sounds made in a language by an outside expert, whether they are
understood or not. By extension, etic is the study of a culture by an anthropological specialist,
and emic is the understanding of the culture from the point of view of the native. Which is
better? Both of course are important to do/have. Besides, etic is just someone else’s emic.
What are the unique traditions of anthropology that differentiate it from other social sciences?
First there is participant observation, in which the anthropologist who is doing the ethnographic
study, for example, becomes a participant in the culture being studied, not just observing it from
the outside. Another hallowed tradition is cross-cultural comparison of anthropological data so
as to study humanity as a whole, not just “Western” (white, Judeo-Christian, Euroamerican)
culture. Finally, anthropology is holistic, meaning it is inclusive of many different kinds of
research, linking the biological and cultural and looking for the worldwide perspective. All this
can relate to the modern world’s different political agendas. Applied anthropology offers
advocacy for people without power, without history. Anthropological views of current world
problems can include studying the origins of civilization and the long history of violence in the
Middle East, the imposition of Western technology and values upon other cultures, or the
application of methods from within a culture to help alleviate poverty, disease, and other ills.
What are the subdisciplines of anthropology? See diagram on page 17 of Ashmore and Sharer
text [project on screen]. First there is the twofold division of biological and cultural, with each
overlapping the other. Can we separate biology and culture? Nature vs. nurture arguments are
among the most crucial in many world issues today (whether in questions of gender, race,
ethnicity, or other social stratification; medicine; and so forth).