1.1. Religion offers a rich vein of material for exploring the complexity of human culture, including systems of belief and systems of power.
1.2. Instead we understand that relgious worlds are real, meaninful, and powerful to those who live in them.
2. Sexuality
2.1. It is cultural arena within which our desires are expressed, socialized, and even thwarted.
2.2. After Wolrd war II, however, antjhropological interest turned away from explict attention to sexuality and focused instead on related issues of marriage, kinship and the family.
3. Race and Racism
3.1. In fact, humans are almost identical, sharing more than 99.9 percent of our DNA.
3.2. As a result of this gene flow, human variation changes gradually over geographic space in a continuum , not by abrupt shifts or clearly marked groups.
4. Ethnicity and Nationalism
4.1. We build a sense of relationship, belonging and shared identiy thorugh connections to family, religion, hometown, language, shared history, citizenship, sports, age, gender, sexuality, education and profession.
4.2. Anthropologists see ethnicity as a cultural construction, not as a natural formation based on biology or inherent human nature.
5. Global economy
5.1. Cohen suggests five primary adaptive strategies that developed at different times and places: food foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture, and industrialism.
5.2. Anthropologist identify three types of reciprocity defined by the social distance between exchange partners: generalized reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity.
6. Anthropology in a Global Age
6.1. paleoanthropologists trace the history of human evolution by reconstruction the human record. Ketut Wiradyanda unearths a fossilized human skeleton buried in a cave in Indonesias Aceh province.
6.2. Once noted for the study of seemingly far-away people and "exotic" people and places, anthropologists today increasingly study the complex interaction of diverse communities in global cities like New York.
7. Culture
7.1. An emerging synthesis looks at genes as part of a developmental history in which biology and culture are deeply intertwined and entangled in a dynamic and ongoing biocultural process of change (Fuentes 2013) (51).
7.2. The culture of consumerism includes norms, values, beliefs, practices, and intuitions that have become commonplace and accepted as normal and cultivate the desire to acquire consumer goods to enhance ones lifestyle (McCracken 1991, 2005) (53).
8. Origins
8.1. Across the pacific ocean, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), considered by many to be the "father of fieldwork" went even further than boas in developing cultural anthropology's research methods. (69)
8.2. Betwen the 1920's and 1960's, many British social anthropologists viewed anthropology more as science designed to discovered the component elements and patterns of society.
9. Language
9.1. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposed that languages establish certain mental categories, or classifications of reality, almost like a grammar for organizing the worldview that shapes peoples ways of perceiving the worlds.
9.2. language does not control or restrict our thinking.
10. Gender
10.1. from the moment of birth we begin to learn culture, including how to walk, talk, eat, dress, think, practice religion, raise children, respond to violence, and express our emotions like a man or a woman.
10.2. over a lifetime, gender becomes a powerful, and mostly invisible, framework that shapes the way we see ourselves and others.
