Lisbon, Portugal

Anthropology: Politics and Images of Culture and Museology

Antropologia: Políticas e Imagens da Cultura e Museologia

Table of contents

⇑Anthropology: Politics and Images of Culture and Museology at ISCTE

Language: Portuguese Studies in Portuguese
Subject area: social
University website: www.iscte.pt
Type: PhD/Doctoral programme
Academic degree: Doutor
Duration: 240 ECTS

⇑Definitions and quotes

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.
Culture
Culture () is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Some aspects of human behavior, social practices such as culture, expressive forms such as art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies such as tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing are said to be cultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
Politics
Politics (from Greek: πολιτικά, translit. Politiká, meaning "affairs of the cities") is the process of making decisions that apply to members of a group.
Anthropology
Our ultimate task is to find interpretative procedures that will uncover each bias and discredit its claims to universality. When this is done the eighteenth century can be formally closed and a new era that has been here a long time can be officially recognised. The individual human being, stripped of his humanity, is of no use as a conceptual base from which to make a picture of human society. No human exists except steeped in the culture of his time and place. The falsely abstracted individual has been sadly misleading to Western political thought. But now we can start again at a point where major streams of thought converge, at the other end, at the making of culture. Cultural analysis sees the whole tapestry as a whole, the picture and the weaving process, before attending to the individual threads.
Mary Douglas and B. Isherwood (1979). The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London, Allen Lane, page 63
Politics
A weapon that comes down as still
As snowflakes fall upon the sod;
But executes a freeman's will,
As lightning does the will of God;
And from its force, nor doors nor locks
Can shield you; 'tis the ballot-box.
John Pierpont, A Word from a Petitioner.
Anthropology
The last bastions of resistance to evolutionary theory are organized religion and cultural anthropology.
Napoleon Chagnon cited in: "How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist" by Emily Eakin, The New York Times. February 13, 2013
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