CRITICAL THINKING PAPER

Critical Thinking Paper

Critical Thinking Paper

Anthropology is the study of human beings for the benefit of human beings. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict said, "The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences." The differences (and commonalities) that anthropologists are interested in are both cultural and physical in nature. Anthropology includes the reconstruction of past cultures (archaeology), the study of living cultures (cultural anthropology), and the study of physical adaptations humans have made to various environments (physical anthropology) (Hastrup 2005). One of the goals of anthropology is to promote understanding among peoples, to study why people behave the way they do which is an increasingly important venture in an increasingly interconnected global community.

Cultural anthropologists study human behaviour by means of first-hand observation and interviewing within particular communities, and interpret that behaviour by comparison with the results of similar studies in other communities.

Cultural anthropology teaches us how to understand the internal logic of other societies, those other "colours," and to make sense of behaviour that strikes us, at first, as senseless or even immoral. We learn to avoid "ethnocentrism," the tendency to judge strange customs on the basis of our preconceptions derived from our own society. It teaches us to stay away from perception disorders such as Halo affect, First impressions, physical appearances, irrelevant cues etc and to view an object or a person, as it is, not in the light of any predominant characteristic (Murphy 1999).

As the science of cultural anthropology has developed, specialized branches focusing on some particular aspect of human culture have emerged: economic anthropology, psychological anthropology, ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, educational anthropology, and many others.

Linguistic anthropology is another of anthropology's major branches, and it looks at the historical development of human languages and the ways in which that development can be used to unravel the relationships ...