Culture As Given, Culture As Choice / Edition 2

by Dirk van der Elst

Overview

Distilling what he has learned from 25 years of teaching it, Van der Elst presents a textbook for a course in cultural anthropology within a general education curriculum. He believes that the main point of higher education is its liberating effect, so, though he covers the usual topics, his purpose is not to convey what has been said about culture by previous scholars, but to provoke students to grapple with some of the issues. The first edition was published in 1999. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781577662693
Publisher:	Waveland Press, Inc.
Publication date:	01/25/2003
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

	Foreword	xiii
	Why This Book	xvii
1	Beginning with Sex Why Males Exist and How Women Are Unique	1
	Sex in Nature	4
	Sex among Humans	6
	The Human Sexes	9
2	The Other Double Helix From Reflex to Culture	13
	The First Imperatives	16
	Primary Drives	17
	Secondary Drives	22
	Creatures of Habit	23
	Fetalizing a Primate	25
3	How Your Culture Works on You Perception and Behavior as Cultural Artifacts	29
	The Culture Concept	32
	How You Got Culture	33
	One World, One Culture	44
	A Ray of Hope	47
	Making the Culture Concept Manageable	48
	On Definitions	52
4	In the Beginning Was the Word Language	55
	Your Sound System	57
	Rules and Meaning	61
	Communicating	65
	Losing Babel's Benefits	71
5	The Marrying Kind Kinship I-Affiliation	75
	The Biology of Sociality	77
	Sexuality Revisited	78
	Working the Reproductive Drives	82
	Marriage	83
	Marriage Types and Family Systems	92
	What's Love Got to Do with It?	100
	Divorce	102
6	Bloodline Logics Kinship II-Reckoning	105
	Reckoning Affiliation	108
	Kinship Nomenclatures	108
	Bilateral Systems	115
	Unilineal Systems	119
	Kinship as Ideal Construct	131
	Significance	133
7	The Shaft, and How You Got It Inequality	135
	The Attributes of Inequality	138
	The Consequences of Inequality	140
	The Origins of Inequality	142
	Cultures of Inequality	146
	The Prerequisites for Stratification	148
	Types of Stratification	152
	Sexual and Racial Inequality	163
	The Purposes of Inequality	166
8	If It Works, It's Obsolete Technology and Culture Change	169
	From Fire to the Stars	171
	The Revolutionary Inventions	176
	Change and Evolution	177
	Evolution: Adaptation to Ongoing Change	182
	You and Culture Change	185
9	The Unquenchable Thirst Knowing	189
	How Knowledge Is Gained	191
	The Pervasiveness of Magic	194
	Scientific Thinking	196
	Magical Thinking	198
	How Do You Know?	198
	How Do You Know That What You Know Is Actually So?	202
10	A Reason to Live Worth Dying For Believing	211
	Stories	214
	Ideology	222
	Religion	224
	Functions of Religion	229
	Ideology as Agent of Change	237
11	Futures and Alternatives Cultural Trends	243
	The Population Bomb	245
	Environmental Collapse	249
	Inequality in the Third Millennium	250
	Futures We Have Managed to Avoid	251
	The Eternal Dichotomy	255
	The Slippery Slope	260
	Killer Culture	264
12	Prepping for the Third Millennium Improving Your Odds	277
	Bringing It Home	279
	Surviving Well in Interesting Times	282
	A Functional Education	289
	And Now a Word from Our Sponsor	290
	Scenarios	293
	Index	297