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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 ...

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,...

Cultural imperialism is the process and practice of promoting one culture over another and often occurs through programs designed to assist other nations, particularly developing nations. Historically this occurred during colonization where one nation overpowers another weaker country for economic or political gain. Culture can be imposed in a wide variety of ways such as through restructuring education, religious, and political institutions. Cultural imperialism is different from cultural diffusion primarily due to the mechanisms involved in changing culture and the roles power plays in the process. Contemporary practices that result in cultural imperialism often take the form of development or assistance programs for struggling nations or communities. In recent years contemporary globalization, or globalism , is the new vehicle by which cultural imperialism can occur. People supporting the expansion of free markets contend that cultures are n...

T he idea of cultural citizenship has emerged through three main phases of debate. Firstly there was an attempt to extend the categories of citizenship to include questions of culture. Here there was a retracing of the debates on citizenship that was largely concerned with questions of rights and duties in the context of national societies to include issues related to culture. This work owed a great deal to attempts to link sociology and cultural studies found in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and others.  During phase one of the cultural citizenship debate issues related to the commodification of culture, access to the relevant cultural capital and the decline in cultural authority of the traditional arts dominated.   Cultural citizenship was crucially a normative category that aimed to develop the conditions for a popular participatory democracy and a culturally inclusive society. However, the contours of this debate began to change through a...

African-American writer and activist W.E.B. Du Bois saw at the dawn of the last century racism’s bloody climax, the culmination of a 200-year history in which Europeans ordered and ranked humankind through the mechanism of ‘race’ . The idea of ‘race’ had been created over two centuries within science and philosophy to justify the supremacy of white Europeans. For Du Bois, the problem of the colour line not only included the experience of African-Americans who had been enslaved as chattel property and segregated by Jim Crow laws; it also included European forms of colonial domination and dispossession. Furthermore, it provided the mechanism through which to persecute Jews and gypsies Europe’s internal ‘others’  and a means to justify the Third Reich’s Final Solution. George Fredrickson (2002) has pointed out, the twentieth century saw the emergence of ‘overtly racist regimes’ where racist ideas were codified into laws and forms of public policy in the American South, ...

All societies recognize bodily sexed difference and organize their societies according to what these differences mean. By making distinctions, and thus creating categories, social order or structure is constructed. Through creating categories, the meanings of female and male are made and thereby lived. It is via this process that individuals come to know who they are in terms of self-understanding and the understanding and perception of others.  This position in language is one aspect of what is termed social structure or social order. These terms include language and its use; architecture and the built environment; and institutions and their settings (schools, government, religions and their organizations, marriage and laws). Gender identity is ‘learned and achieved at the interactional level, reified at the cultural level, and institutionally enforced via the family, law, religion, politics, economy, medicine, and the media. Sociologists generally make a d...

The term pattern is used for those arrangements or systems of internal relationship which give to any culture its coherence or plan and keep it from being a mere accumulation of random bits.The total system or the ideology of patterning is called a configuration.Kroeber has distinguished two major kinds of pattern: 1. Basic or Systemic Pattern- These are those that have persisted for years and years as coherent organization of traits  with functional value ( agriculture,monotheism) 2.Secondary Pattern- These are those that are subject to a great variety and instability( formal social organization,system of thought). As an out growth from Kroeber's conceptualizations came the Patterns of Culture written by Ruth Benedict.She added  a new dimension to the two types of patterns described by Kroeber.She refers to those qualities of cultural organization which come to prevade all or most spheres of some cultures and give them a distinctive individual slant.Benedict made use of psych...