Rampant In Many Other Cultures example essay topic

Classical Readings on Cultural AnthropologyByGary Ferraro What do we have to learn through the study of different cultures? I was hoping for some wonderful revelation in the collection of writings. I may have found one. This book was a difficult read for me. I am not sure whether it's my age or my inexperience with classical readings. I also found it difficult to formulate a report on a collection of readings, the last report I did was on Laura Ingall's Little House on the Prairie.

This reading was a little more challenging. The main point that seemed to jump out at me is that perceptions change, our theory of reality changes with every viewpoint. Every culture can seem primitive, self destructive, nonsensical, immoral or just wrong, depending on who is doing the observation and what perspective they are observing from. In the first reading, Narcirema, points very clearly to the fact that our own culture could seem very odd, irrational, and ritualistic to an outsider. But aren't we all outsiders to everyone else? Don't we see ourselves as "normal" and everyone else as "abnormal"?

I think it is human nature more than ethnocentrism. My daily rituals would seem very irrational to another woman of my age in different circumstances. That's where the saying comes from that you don't really know a person till you walk a mile in their shoes. The second reading of "Queer Customs" gets right to my point that culture is an abstraction; therefore each person doing the viewing views it differently. Culture is pointed out as being a "way of thinking, feeling, and believing" and since I have never met anyone who thought exactly the way I did about everything, one would have to conclude that we each have our own culture and our own views of other cultures. I wasn't really sure that the next reading really fit in with the others in the book.

Rapport-talk versus Report-talk seemed insignificant to the other passages. It is a well-known fact, in all walks of life that men and women of any race, creed, or culture are different and that we have different and sometimes contrasting ways of communicating with each other. I was surprised to find this seemingly simple theory in this book. Yet again back to my question; am I getting the intended message from the author? The Christmas Ox story made so much more sense to me and had great importance when I read the passage on Potlatch. This helped solidify my thinking about how perception and perspective changes reality.

When Richard Bors hay Lee wrote about the conundrum with the ox, he was writing from the perspective of hurt feelings. He had spent a year with these people and they humiliated him and hurt him and he needed to find out why. Then along comes someone else, Marvin Harris, and he uses the exact same incident as an "amusing story" to point out the need of the peoples to curb the ego. I don't think Mr. Lee thought is was amusing at the time, however that is how Mr. Harris perceived it. I don't think that either of these stories belonged in the Economics and Ecology section. It appears to me that Mr. Harris has taken his theory way beyond the economical points of world cultures.

He seems much more interested in exploring the theory of why we work at jobs and are not just self-sustaining. He gives much credence to the fact that if we would return to the hunter-gatherer state that we could work less and be better off. Next we move into the Marriage and Family Section, with a writing from Melvyn C. Goldstein. This was a much easier read for me - less technical or scientific terms that I am as yet unfamiliar with. This was an interesting story of why one woman would take on many husbands in the Tibetan culture. I thoroughly understood this passage and appreciated the insight given by the author.

It appeared non-judgmental and non-condescending like some of the other passages I had read to this point. Death without Weeping by Nancy Schemer-Hughes takes you on a journey through the impoverished peoples of a Brazilian shantytown and the plight of infant death. As a mother this is difficult for me to understand, how could someone continue to get pregnant only to let her child die? Where are the fathers in this story, why continue to get pregnant if you cannot even care for yourself? I try to understand their culture and the society that has shaped their practices but still I am angry and hurt for those children and for their mothers. There are many things that could be done to change things in their situation but not knowing their culture and their ways of thinking, who I am to say it shouldn't be that way?

Two things stick out in the story of Society and Sex Roles, the first is that the relationship of obligatory giving and receiving has once again jumped to the forefront. Those who have control over the giving and receiving of goods are the dominant ones; those who are able to create obligations are the leaders. At the beginning of this writing there is a reference to a culture that beats women for being to slow to cook. I wonder what the difference is between these men and dictators like Sada mm Hussein. Why don't the women's activist groups do something about this? Why is this allowed in our advanced society today?

I understand that this is not happening in suburban America but we have gone off on other "humanitarian fights" why would the world today allow such torture? The story of the! Kung men and women was interesting reading. Seemed to come directly from an American Soap Opera. It appears that drama is a worldwide addiction, divorce, separation, adultery are rampant in many other cultures than ours so why are we so surprised when our divorce rate is so high.

It seems that men and women of all cultures and societies have difficulty in making partnerships last a lifetime. I wonder if this is one of the cultural universals that we can't seem to free ourselves from. I do feel a little better now about my two divorces and happy that I didn't have to suffer they way Nisa did. Once again I see that we have commonalities with such vastly different cultures. Reciprocity is yet again at the forefront in the K pelle Moot. We have much to learn from viewing these different cultures from the viewpoint of cultural relativism.

I am pleased again with the writers lack on judgment and condemnation. The moots take on the cases that we would take to small claims court or family court where the participants are willingly given to the courts decision as opposed to criminal law where the defendant is not choosing to be judged except for by his actions. If we Americans had more respect for our courts we might be more successful in our attempts at a therapeutic resolution. In the next section we move to a very interesting take on American Schools as of 1963.

There is detailed information about how the school system teaches children to be stupid, to be like everyone else and suppress individuality and creativity. I am very surprised that this writing was not taken into consideration when schools stopped giving awards to those students who achieved high honors and awarded everyone for something. That does not set a standard to rise above. As stated in the writing, "we can manage only by reducing children all to a common definition". I find this very true from my own school experience where I was kicked out of school for being pregnant, even though I was an honor and advanced placement student. The following year they opened a separate school for pregnant students.

I am now hoping to stay out of the nightmare and continue my education. Speaking of nightmares, I was anxious to see what Evans-Pritchard had to say about witchcraft. I was hoping for some fairytale story of witches and goblins and fairies and elves. Instead, I got a very cut and dry explanation that the Zande believe that failures, sickness, and other tragic events are the cause of witchcraft. To the Zande, witchcraft is factual, their way of life and sees no need to have any other explanation for their own misgivings and shortcomings. This is my same argument with modern Christian churches that spout the belief that if only you are following God's Will that good things will happen and if bad things happen then that is the way God wants them to be so we are left to suffer.

At least the Zande do not suffer so mentally as Christians do. It's witchcraft that caused the suicide, hut burning, blight, etc. Not any fault of their own and no way for them to fix it. Their beliefs show a lack of responsibility and accountability for their own actions. I wonder at how their beliefs came to be? One husband cheats on his wife and all of a sudden it's witchcraft?

What an interesting world we live in. It is an interesting world isn't it? Baseball magic? Why is it ok for a baseball player to perform a ritual before every game and the most of society looks at them and giggle at the silliness of it, but if there are a group of women out in the field performing their ritual before every full moon then society looks upon them as evil, deranged, crazy, possessed. In the last two readings, we come upon some very remarkable statements of how our behavior with a foreign culture during research could ultimately cause the demise of the entire culture. Sharp's and Bodley's detailed description of simple "helpful" actions that have generational, historical implications are dramatic and still, and maybe even more so, relevant to modern cultural diffusion.

We don't often think critically about our efforts to "help" others. We just dive in and "fix things", this seems to come with the thinking that "we know better than they do". This is a common problem in today's governments around the world. This is the result of ethnocentrism. This book has certainly taught me one thing. American culture is very ethnocentric.

Ours is one that is a "nightmare" to navigate the good and the bad because there are so many double standards. I think this speaks to the very core of contention among Americans these days. Very few of our leaders do what is right, and each of us has our own definition of right. Maybe if more people could really walk outside of their own daily rituals, beliefs, habits and commandments, and truly look at human kind without a superiority gauge, then the world would be a better place with less war, less suffering, less judgment and more peace, happiness, success, and creativity.