1.1. "It is remarkably flexible and fluid, responding to changes in the surrounding culture and enabling us to describe and analyze our world with remarkable specificity." (Guest 121) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
1.2. Language is a way in which an individual can express themselves and understand those around them. It has the power to shape and change cultures, create new ones, and erase existing ones. Language is always changing and adapting.
2. Gender
2.1. "As we see gender being performed all around us, we learn to perform it in our turn. In these ways gender is taught, learned, performed, and policed." (Guest 275) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
2.2. Gender can be determined through a few factors, whether that be what is taught to an individual based on their sex, based on their culture, or based on what is deemed feminine and masculine by those around them. Gender is much more fluid than it is absolute.
3. Sexuality
3.1. "Sexuality...is an arena in which people debate ideas of what is moral, appropriate, and "natural" and use those ideas to create unequal access to society's power, privleges, and resources." (Guest 312) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
3.2. Sexuality is a complex thing to define as it pertains to physical relationships and desires of an individual but also the culture surrounding an individual that determines their status and the way they are percieved by those in power or around them.
4. Class and Inequality
4.1. "Systems of class stratify individual's life chances and affect their possibilities for upward social mobility." (Guest 388) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
4.2. Within society there is a class system that is unequally divided among everyone. The rich tend to get richer while the poor tend to become more poor. The reasoning for this can depend on an individuals life chances and how those effect their social mobility.
5. Race and Racism
5.1. "Race has served to create and justify patterns of power and inequality within cultures worldwide, and many people have learned to see those patterns as normal and reasonable." (Guest 197) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
5.2. While there is technically only one biological race, the human race, race has become culturally real and relevant around the world. The world we live in is organized by systems and race is a factor that sets people apart within them and around them. Racism contributes to the inequality and injustices within these systems.
6. Anthropology in a Global Age
6.1. "Anthropologists believe that all humans share connections that are biological, cultural, economic, and ecological." (Guest 11) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
6.2. Through the four-field approach of Anthropology we can accurately study humans and make connections from the distant past to the present and even make predictions for the future.
7. Culture
7.1. "Culture is a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people." (Guest 35) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
7.2. Culture is a way in which an individual perceives their reality. It can create time in a way that make sense to the individual. Culture is a significant part of what creates and allows diversity among humans.
8. Human Origins
8.1. "Evolution is harder to study in humans because of the relatively long time between generations, as well as people's general reluctance to be studied." (Guest 165) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
8.2. Evolution is a proven scientific principle. There are a few reasons as to why evolution is not a unanimously accepted reason for how humans came to be. Religion and lack of concrete evidence are two main ones. I found the concept of deep time to be very interesting. Our perspective is limited as human's in the big picture of Earth and creation.
9. Religion
9.1. "People make sense of the world, reach decisions, and organize their lives on the basis of their religious beliefs." (Guest 572) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
9.2. Defining religion is a difficult thing to do because of global diversity. Religion is an important to thing to study and understand because it has the power to transform minds, lives, and communities as a whole.
10. Global Economy
10.1. "At the most basic level, an economy is a cultural adaptation to the environment - a set of ideas, activites, technologies that enable a group of humans to use the available land, resources, and labor to satisfy their basic needs and, if organized well, to thrive." (Guest 440) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
10.2. The economy of today's world is not sustainable, however, it is not irreversible. If humans can examine and re-evaluate their ecological footprint, the ways in which they consume products, the ways in which they acquire labor and production of goods, and more the current economy could become more sustainable.
11. Ethnicity and Nationalism
11.1. "As the effects of globalization intersect with systems of power at the local level, many people turn to ethnic networks and expressions of ethnic identity to protect their local way of life in the face of intense pressures of homogenization." (Guest 241) Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. W.W. Norton & Company
11.2. Race is commonly roped into the conversation with ethnicity, however, the two are different. Ethnicity is sometimes difficult to define because it is a sense of connection between people who may share a common history, story, culture, or more. Ethnicity is something that many people identify with and there are many reasons why they do.
