Stepping back for a moment, consider the problems facing us as humans on our shared planet. Climate change threatens the survival of humanity and the biodiversity of plants and animals. Forms of deeply entrenched inequality fuel racial, ethnic, and class conflicts within and between nations. These are global problems, transnational problems, cross-cultural problems. Human beings need to find a way to communicate and cooperate across the sociocultural boundaries that divide us, always recognizing the power dynamics involved in that process.
How can we do this? Anthropology teaches us that we may never understand exactly how it feels to be a member of a different culture or group within our own culture. But if we want to work together with people of different sociocultural backgrounds to solve these pressing global issues, we have to try. Long-term fieldwork and cross-cultural collaboration are not perfect solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural understanding, but these methods give us a place to begin. And anthropological methods and insights can be transformative, making possible the kinds of empathy and dialogue necessary to solve our global problems.
The goal of this anthropology textbook is to guide you in this process of transformation as you learn about the cultural lives of the various peoples with whom you share this planet.
Mini-Fieldwork Activity
Representation and Otherness
List three characters from fictional movies or television shows who represent people from cultures different from your own. What adjectives would you use to describe these characters? How are they made to appear? How do they act? Are they central or marginal characters? What role does each play in the plot or theme? What might be the consequences of representing cultural groups in this way? Do you see evidence of ethnocentrism, primitivism, and/or orientalism as described in this chapter?
The content of this course has been taken from the free Anthropology textbook by Openstax