Occasionally during class discussion we will review or talk about topics that you may want to review when looking over your notes for the midterm exam. This page will summarize some of these items. Please let me know (lctodd@lamar.colostate.edu) if there is other information relative to our discussions that you'd like me to include.
| Jan 19 |
I. Introduction to Class -- review of syllabus.
1. Use the weekly writing assignments to help assemble the information that you'll need for the exam and term paper.
2. All "Additional Readings" binders are available
II. Reasons for studying hunter-gatherers.
1. Importance to understanding the development of anthropological theory.2. Important to understanding of the development of many European ideas on political, social, and economic order.
3. Importance for understanding the long-term cultural, social, and biological evolution of our species
4. Important to become aware of the complexities and diversity of hunter-gatherer lifeways in order to help understand the rights of indigenous peoples -- awareness of our ethnocentrism.
5. Of central importance to the development of methods to create reliable interpretations of past hunter-gatherer groups.
6. Helps to understand humans as part of ecological communities rather than separate from "The Ecology"
7. Fosters and understanding of the multidimensional aspects of the human environment that includes cultural, social, physical, and climatic components.
8. Forces us to think about geographic and temporal scales of research greater than we usually consider.
9. Encourages an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the human condition.
10. Emphasizes that in spite of the great diversity of hunter-gatherer lifeways, and the often very different nature of their lives and ours, that there are some common threads of planning, communication, education, and technology that are key components of all human adaptations.
III. Bottom-up and Top-down research: attempting to develop a research cycle.
III. Finding ethnographic information -- an important source of information is the Ehnographic Atlas. You can get some information on-line at this site. Take some time and look at the tables (begin by selecting hunting as the row variable and see how other cultural attributes vary).
