Essays on Anthropology

I examined the article by Shanshan Du titled “‘Husband and Wife Do It Together’: Sex/Gender Allocation of Labor among the Qhawqhat Lahu of Lancang, Southwest China” which “explores both the diversity and commonality of human labor organization in response to sex difference through an ethnographic…

Among the most distinguished and long-standing debates in the anthropology of economy in general – and that of exchange in particular – is the divide between formalists and substantivists that occurred during the 20th century. These perspectives, as coined by Polanyi, provide distinct explanations for…

Introduction The name of the film that I will be anthropologically analyzing is My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The film is a romantic comedy which revolves around a woman named Toula Portokalos and as you can tell from the last name she comes from a…

Anthropology refers to the science of human beings which analysis humanity in different concepts ranging from the biological and evolutionary aspect to the aspect of society and culture which differentiate human beings with other animals. As an academic discipline, anthropology exists as an intersection of…

In his article entitled “Rethinking Medical Anthropology: How Anthropology is Failing Medicine,” Colin P. Hemmings shares many fascinating insights on the connections between anthropology and medicine. It’s clear that efforts have been made to establish commonalities between the anthropological and medical fields. The primary purpose…

The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast two of the most famous female anthropologists of the 20th century, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. I will also briefly mention their backgrounds and the relationship between the two of them. Benedict and Mead were…

In this essay I will explore how the human foot can be used as an example of perspectives and approaches that are used in biological anthropology. The perspectives and approaches will include macroevolution, microevolution, the comparative approach and the biocultural approach. I will define each…

According to anthropologist Ashley Montagu, “We in the Western world are beginning to discover our neglected senses”. In architecture, this expresses itself in the emphasis and utilization of immateriality along with materiality. Immaterial architecture involves the “subjective and unpredictable”. The immaterial qualities of a building…

Anthropology today is not only moving towards new ways of operating past decades of postmodern and postcolonial criticism, but also, according to the authors of this course’s reading list, away from outdated terminology and approach. Where classical anthropology, in the spirit of Durkheim, Boas, and…

In this essay, I will be discussing the concept of symbolic anthropology and how humans create their own fate and reality. Clifford Geertz was an American cultural anthropologist who began the thinking of symbolic anthropology. According to Geertz, symbolic anthropology was “a system of inherited…