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Showing posts from January, 2014

Anthropology-Scope and Value

Anthropology is usually classified as a social science along with disciplines such as sociology, economics, political science and psychology but it has much in common with natural sciences like biology and geology as also with religion and art in the field of humanities. The diverse field of anthropology has broader scope than other social sciences. Anthropologists are interested in all human beings and their different aspects such as skin color, kinship system, religious beliefs, technologies and other aspects of life. In physical anthropology, investigation of the evolution of the human species, physical variations among different human groups and anatomy of monkeys, apes and humans are studied. Primatology is a line of specialization within anthropology and it specializes in the evolution, anatomy, adaptation and social behavior of primates which constitutes the taxonomic order including humans.Anthropogists studying the variation in the human beings seek to measure and ...

Components of Symbolic Culture

Gestures   movements of the body to communicate with others are shorthand ways to convey messages without using words. Although people in every culture of the world use gestures, a gesture’s meaning may change completely from one culture to another. Gestures not only facilitate communication but also, because they differ around the world, can lead to misunderstanding, embarrassment, or worse. To get along in another culture, then, it is important to learn the gestures of that culture. It is also significant that certain gestures can elicit emotions; some gestures are so closely associated with emotional messages that the gestures themselves summon up emotions. T he primary way in which people communicate with one another is through  language — symbols that can be combined in an infinite number of ways for the purpose of communicating abstract thought. Each word is actually a symbol, a sound to which we have attached some particular meaning. By means of language, we pass ideas,...