Prague, Czech Republic

Anthropology

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: social
University website: www.cuni.cz
Years of study: 4
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humans and human behaviour and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Anthropology
The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.
Richard Lewontin "The Last of the Nasties?" in New York Review of Books (2/29/96)
Anthropology
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) Tristes Tropiques. Chapter 6 : The Making of an Anthropologist, p. 55
Anthropology
Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant.
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, (1986)
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