Points of View

This post is to hopefully recap a bit of the discussion from today's class. While anthropology has traditionally focused primarily on culture, I tried to emphasize other aspects of the human experience and how they articulate with culture. However, it might be best to think of the four divisions I used as different angles from which to look at the same thing...humans.

• Cultural--This refers to the dimension of human life, in my opinion, best described as the learned understandings shared by a group of people about how to behave and what everything means.  This highlights the collective mental, socially acquired and symbolic aspect of human life.
• Social--This refers to the idea that humans almost universally live in social groups beyond mother-offspring units.  Further, humans exhibit a tremendous diversity in the size and composition of their social groups.
• Material--This refers to the fact that humans are biological creatures that need to eat, drink and reproduce in specific environmental contexts which are composed of particular mixes of geology, botany, zoology and climatology.  
• Historical--This refers to the idea that what happened in the past shapes the character of the present.

Again, each of these points is like a viewing perspective.  They all simultaneously construct the human experience.  I like to think of them as a four sided mobius strip in which you follow one side, but end up on the other.