Week 2: The concept of culture and the two anthropologies

Week 2: The concept of culture and the two anthropologies

ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2026)
August 11, 2026

Contemporary anthropology stresses that each society has a unique worldview which makes sense on its own terms.

Main reading: Eriksen (2015b); Eriksen (2015a)

Other reading: Pierpont (2004)

Notes

Modern anthropology introduced the idea that the world was made up of people from many different cultures, and that each culture made sense on its own terms, and that no culture was better or more sophisticated than any other culture.

Anthropologists were not the first to puzzle over human diversity. It has been something that many people in many different intellectual traditions have sought to explain for centuries. Some of them were philosophers, some where theologians, some were historians, and some were natural scientists—and some of them even said they were anthropologists.

But they weren’t—not like us. There have always been two anthropologies.

• One kind of anthropology says that people are more or less human. If someone is different it is because they are not fully human.
• Another kind of anthropology fought back against this, and said that everyone person had the same claim to being human but expressed it differently. Just because they were different did not mean that they were inferior.

The second kind of anthropology fought against the first and eventually this fight led to the creation of the kind of anthropology we study in this class. Modern anthropology starts with two ideas

• Any person can learn any culture. Everyone has the same basic psychology.
• Instead of thinking of differences in linear terms, or how culture-d a group is, cultures are plural. People belong to many different culture-s

There were several different thinkers who contributed a part of to this idea of cultures in the plural. We will talk about two, Edward Tylor and Franz Boas, and we will talk a lot about how Boas’s concept of culture and his maxim of cultural relativism created anthropology as we know it.

Possible activities for tutorial

1. Discuss how you can work together with your peers to make sure everyone benefits from going to tutorial each week.

• What are your best and worst experiences in tutorial discussions?
• What should teachers promise students?
• What should students promise each other?
• What should students promise teachers?
• What are some ways to make sure everyone has a chance to participate?

2. Look at this two-by-two grid, which draws from Eriksen (2015b).

   Traits can fall into one of two columns, either innate (left) or acquired, meaning learned (right), and one of two rows, either universal (top) or particular (bottom). [Image created by gen AI.]

   1. For each quadrant, generate some examples of a behavior or trait that belongs there.
   2. Which were easy and which were hard?
   3. Which ones were controversial? Why?

3. Imagine a baby born in one country (e.g. Finland, Turkey, Tunisia) is adopted at birth and raised by parents who were born in and live in another country (e.g. Singapore, Slovakia, Egypt). The adoptive parents have other children whom they have raised since birth. In your opinion, what would be the important differences and similarities between the adopted child and its biological siblings raised by its birth parents once they have all grown to adulthood?

Keywords

culture, Franz Boas, Edward Tylor, ethnocentrism, relativism

Learning outcomes

• Understand the obligations of students to each other and their teachers, and the teachers’ obligations to the students
• Understand the origins of the concept of culture, and the importance of the shift from singular culture to plural cultures
• Understand the Boasian concept of culture and its relationship to a principle of relativism