Order your essay today — written by real experts, guaranteed plagiarism-free, and ready to impress your professor!
The Value of Cultural Anthropology – Essay Sample
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology ESSAY While humans are all united as a single species, sharing the same DNA, physical features and basic physique, a diversity of cultures and languages has emerged and continues to exist among humans today. We are all one human species, but we are divided by unique traditions that identifies us as individuals within our culture and society.
Need Help Writing an Essay?
Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your paper.
Write My Essay For MeWhen those from different cultures and backgrounds interact with each other, these differences in understanding due to culture can at times cause confusion and misunderstanding. By understanding the cultural differences that exist between human groups, many misunderstandings and much frustration could be avoided. This is the role that cultural anthropology has arisen to fulfill.
The cultural anthropologist can have a positive role in creating a greater cultural awareness and respect between cultures. An educational program that focuses on instilling cultural awareness and understanding in students is missing from the basic educational curriculum in the U.S., leading to an adult society in which little cultural awareness exists.
This condition that has led to a great deal of misunderstanding between Americans and people of other cultures. The gap in cultural understanding between Americans and other cultures they regularly interact with has become dangerously wide in the present day, a fact with is contributing to unnecessary strife and violence.
A solution to this dilemma is education, and understanding that the role of the anthropologist, and the study of cultural anthropology, is an essential part in creating a more peaceful world.
The role of the anthropologists in government and politics was, in the past, very hands on and progressive. In fact, anthropology was “once called the handmaiden of colonialism” (Ferraro 89), a relationship that began in the early 1900’s and continued on through the Vietnam War.
The role of anthropologists in colonizing other countries was begun by Britain in as early as 1908, when “anthropologists began training administrators of the Sudanese civil service” (Ferraro 93).
Cultural anthropologists are able to provide keen insight into a culture, its values, social system, norms and expectations. In cases of colonization,war or general strife, this information can be used in order to figure out the best way to reach out to the culture and find a solution to the problem at hand.
The insight and answers that anthropologists provide, however, has not always been particularly welcomed, in part to to cultural bias caused by ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism is defined as the inability to put aside one’s own cultural attitudes and imagine the world from the perspective of a different group. This quality can have many negative effects, especially in the context of business, politics and national security issues (Ferraro 90).
It is ethnocentrism that is at the heart of many of the failed interactions between cultures, due to preconceived held by one person of how a person of another culture should act, react or behave.
Ethnocentrism and a lack of cultural understanding has been a major factor in the prolonged, and mostly failed, war in Iraq. The American and European soldiers and co
