Anthropology

Cultural Relativity Debate Results“It’s a useless and difficult thing to point your finger at someone else and tell them they are wrong in doing something. They will, more than likely, turn it around and note the flaws within you and your culture. . . . Morality is a culturally created bias.” -Amanda“No, some things are [...]

Woolly Mammoth Skeleton at American Museum of Natural HistoryI spent an insurmountable amount of time when I was a little kid staring into a postcard of a woolly mammoth skeleton. The card was postmarked sometime in the 1950s, and some guy wrote an incredibly general message to another guy upon the back of it. What [...]

What is a Global Citizen? “I am no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country – that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black [...]

Culture is Never Static the Exotic is NowThere is a certain tendency to talk of cultures as if they are fixed devices. I do it often. It is perhaps the hallmark of ethnology. The only way of making any sense of a time, a people, or a place is to speak as if all three [...]

Salah-The Muslim PrayerSalah, the Muslim process of formal prayer, is a time-honed practice that is meant to interweave Islamic religious belief within the very fabric of the practioner’s life. Five times a day the prayer is performed in a specific way and is always done while facing the Kaaba of Mecca. Salah is one of [...]

“Smoke is an indication of work . . . therefore, we are proud of our smoke.”Reactions to the thoughtless acquisition and utilization of introduced technology in Southern India.“Developing countries must not and will not allow themselves to be distracted from the imperatives of economic development and growth by the illusory dream of an atmosphere free [...]

A Respectable Development?The Tribals of Arunachal Pradesh: Then and Now“. . . we are faced with the phenomenon of a rapid material, social, and educational development of a tribal society which has found a place in the modern world without so far losing its identity as a distinct ethnic entity.” -Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf (approx. 1980)From [...]

A Visit to a South Indian Archaeological SiteAnd a head first jump into the folk-lexicon of village KarnatakaIt was mid-September and the beginning of a very temperate South Indian Autumn; a group of students and I were on a visit to a local archaeological site just outside of Bangalore city. We all packed into a [...]

Cultural Questions at the Casa Amarela Guesthouse I want to go to Germany, because I do not understand the German people.I believe that it is safe to say that there is such a phenomenon know as cultural tendencies; that various people from different cultures and corners of the globe evince shades of character that have [...]