Understanding Cultural Anthropology

Without abandoning the desire or the fate of examining a burnish in its entirety and being satisfactory to relate different heathenish traits to each other, it is roughlytimes inwrought to look at a limited bea of refinement as a point of entrance into the larger survey of the culture at large and even perhaps as an endpoint in itself. It may be that we have foregvirtuoso beyond the point in the in guaranteeectual history of our sort out in which we believe it to be possible to grasp tout ensemble the aspects of another's culture.

The key step, if we are to study culture from the point of thinking of only some key traits, is to select those traits carefully. While it would tell us some important things some Ameri butt end culture to look at, for example, the kinds of items that are sold at gas post convenience stores (where diapers, cat food and office supplies are mingled with high-fat foods and affordable beer), such as arena is less likely than are others to get us to a truly deep intellectual of Ameri raise cultural values. However, if we were to look at either sacrilegious or religious rituals, or both, than we might have some higher degree of confidence that what we are studying, the particular cultural complex that we have focused on (to use a term that is now somewhat out of date only when that still retains a good degree of usefulness) is genius that can indeed tell us something meaningful about the abide aspects of the culture as a whole.

This, of course, sounds simpler than it actually is, for

Behind the empirical categories of Elkin, moreover, can one not divine the outline of a system? He opposes the totemism of matrilinear clans to that of patrilineal clans, and with good reason. In the former case, the totem is "flesh", in the latter it is "dream"' organic and material in one case, in that locationfore, spiritual and incorporeal in the other. Moreover, matrilineal totemism attests the diachronic and biologic continuity of the clan, it is the flesh and blood perpetuated from generation to generation by the women of the lineage; while patrilineal totemism expresses "the local solidarity of the horde", i.e.

an remote link, no lasting an internal one, territorial and no longer biological, which synchronically - no longer diachronically - unites the members of the clan (Levi-Strauss, 1962, p. 53-4).

A myth can never be interpreted individually, but in its affinity to other myths?

Structuralism in the social sciences is closely link up to the theory of the social system. Although there is nothing new about the root concepts of structuralism (they may be seen in one form or other throughout Western thought) there is no question but that in the present coulomb this view of behavior has become a dominant one in many fields. At bottom it is a reaction against all tendencies to deal with human thought and behavior atomistically, that is, in terms of simple, discrete units of either thought, perception, or overt behavior.

what constitutes a ritual is not to easy a matter to find as one might suppose it to be. What, for example, are the delimit rituals of American society? The Superbowl? A presidential inauguration? A mass in the National Cathedral? All of these, roughly likely, but which others? And should any of these be given primacy? Perhaps we should preferably examine the myths of Americans to determine the ways in which it is best to actualise Americans. Perhaps we should examine such mythic beliefs as homely Destiny, or Yankee ingenuity.

Kroeber
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