Hello class. Welcome to multicultural communication fall 2025. So um just to introduce myself, my name is Randy Flatabo. You may call me Miss Flatabo or Ms. F. I've recently graduated from the University of Florida with a doctorate in anthropology. And um I've also worked at the Florida Museum of Natural History where I study zoo archaeology. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that when I introduce the field of anthropology in a minute. I'm originally from Northern California and um I've spent a lot of time in my adult life in Mexico and since this class's focus is in multicultural communication, I have some firsthand experience of what it's like to become immersed in a new culture, particularly because I am married to a Mexican citizen. So, um this class is designed to help you all become more culturally aware civi citizens of the world. This is an anthropology class which is the discipline that studies humans and most of you are not going to be anthropologists as a profession. But nevertheless, every one of you will benefit from having a basic understanding of the major differences in perspective, experience and expression um between various human cultures and how to uh communicate effectively with one another despite these differences. We are a multicultural society particularly this nation and we are an immigrant country and that's not something to be nervous about. That is something to celebrate and that's the focus of this class. Every culture in the world is the result of a unique trajectory of human experience and a set of adaptive choices determined by history, environment and cosmology. And everyone is valuable to the human race. So the primary purpose of the class is to foster a basic understanding, interest and respect for the diversity of human modes of existence and expression. And um spending some time in other cultures shoes is the best way to do that. And if we can't do it directly, the next best thing is through reading or watching videos helping us to experience other societies as directly as possible. So we're going to cover the primary ways in which humans manifest their culture from survival strategies to gender roles to art and religion as well as the major forms of human communication and common misconceptions that arise from cultural differences as well as the history of how our society came to think the way it does, how we cognitively organize the world, and how other cultures do this differently. We will also discuss some of the major cultural issues in the world that get in the way of communication that cause us to misunderstand and misperceive each other leading to the destabilization of society. Um we have the idea that proper communication is the f first step in propagating tolerance and social harmony. So um as soon as you can please review the syllabus and make sure that you're clear on how the class works. Basically, you are responsible each week for reading the assigned videos, reading the assigned articles or chapters in the book and um watching the assigned videos and then responding to discussion questions and quiz questions for each week based on those things as well as watching the lecture of course. So, please reach out to me if you have any questions for how the class works. My um only overall statement that I would like to make um there's two of them. First is that for your answers on the discussions and quizzes that are written out, uh some quizzes questions are multiple choice. Please try to use as much detail and as possible directly from the examples in the readings that are um requested because um then if I can tell that you're doing the reading and watching the videos, that's more important to me than if you 100% understand everything that's being taught or conveyed. Um, I'm fine with correcting you if you get one or two things wrong, but I will give you full credit as long as I can I again can tell that you did the material. The second thing is please attend to the syllabus portion where it talks about plagiarism. Um, the use of chat GPT or any other AI software is forbidden. Um, I use uh software to allow me to check for these sorts of things. And keep in mind that if you use Grammarly, it can cause your assignment to be flagged uh by this software. So this chance use it. This class has an opportunity to practice your writing skills. I'm not grading on grammar or anything like that. This is just an ability to get used to communicating informally, casually is fine. Um, using information that you're provided. It takes a lot more effort to actually try to cheat or try to look up some of this stuff online than it would be to just actually do the reading. So, that is um the two things I would like to emphasize to you. Okay. So, now we're going to get started with uh the first of the two PowerPoints I'm going to show you today. Okay. So, first, what is culture? And when we talk about culture, um what are we talking about basically? So, we'll look at some of the definitions and um your vocabulary sheet that you'll have for each week, um has all of the terms defined that I use in this lecture. and your study guide which I also uh want to mention briefly that is discussed in the syllabus also has all the key points from these lectures already written out for you. Okay. So what is culture? In this class when we discuss culture a useful metaphor to think about is um if we were computers if humans were computers our bodies would be the hardware and our culture would be the software. So without our culture we would just be these inert lumps of matter. We need our culture to help us interact with the world, make sense of it, and to interact with other computers, other people. Culture is learned. We're not born with culture. It is not biological. Uh culture is shared. While we each have our own cultural peculiarities, most cultures have shared aspects, kinship patterns, religious beliefs, etc. Culture is symbolic. It gives meaning to things. Language is an a good example of the symbolic nature of culture. It's our primary means of communication, but it is entirely symbolic. Um, culture is holistic. That means it encompasses everything. It's a blueprint for living that tells us how to respond to any given situation supposedly. Uh, in reality, of course, culture doesn't provide all the answers. And this is where we see culture change. Culture is integrated. It is a system of institutions that work together to meet the needs of the group. One person or one dominant voice does not determine culture. Um, this is the value of culture. It provides an avenue for discussion for discourse and culture is also pervasive. It cannot be divorced from any aspect of society. Everything we do as humans is cultural. And this is where we come back to this classic dichotomy in the humanities where we and sciences where we ask are humans natural beings or cultural beings or we somehow are we are somehow both but where do we draw the line? Is it even possible to make that distinction? Okay. So now we're going to go over some aspects of culture. Um these are many ways in which humans manifest so make real or express their cultural differences and many of these things you might discuss in your own cultural background discussion for your first assignment. So the arts um think about how many times places ideas um events in history are associated with specific pieces of art, artistic styles, forms or artists. So music um visual art, literature, poetry, film and TV, um performance art of any other kind like theater, design, even architecture and urban planning. The way we decide to organize and portray our world changes over time. Um we also have um clothing and fashion. Again, the way that we dress ourselves and present ourselves to the world is a form of art. group activities. Um, think about the importance of the World Cup, the Olympics, etc. Um, baseball, football, soccer. In many times and places, many societies, these are cornerstones of culture. There are many different competitions and games that humans have engaged in over the course of history that shape the way that people identify their own group and their values and influences their association with others, you know. And back in the day, this was more of a life ordeath situation sometimes. And we have food and cuisine. Food is a huge influencer of culture, as you will see as you look over each other's cultural backgrounds in the discussion assignment. Food is something that humans create and pass down traditions of how to create. It's one of these binding mechanisms that identifies cultures as unique from one another and also gives a distinct um schedule to people's patterns of life in different places, professions, careers, and ways of life. um these different ways that people decide to spend their time and dedicate their world to certain causes or beliefs or values or artistic forms. Um all of this will influence the way that we look at the world, the people that we interact with um and also our impact on the global the global ecosystem. And we also have trends, politics, current events, technology, social media, how all of this stuff affects behavior norms, legislation, and social organization. So these things are changing constantly, and they're always subject to the shifts of politics and economics, but they do determine a lot of how we identify ourselves and our own people and our own country and how we also um negotiate our interactions with others. So think about how the world changed basically when AI started happening and then before that when suddenly everyone could go wireless and use Bluetooth and before that when we suddenly had the ability to have conversations with people who weren't next to us. So it goes back and back but these sorts of things impact culture a lot. Okay. Some examples of culture that are um a little bit in a different sphere. So mainstream culture is the more widespread palatable aspects of our social identity that are reinforced by entertainment and and uh media. For example, parts of our history, the founding of America and American political philosophy, Rosie the Riveter, the American experience of World War II for the United States. Uh these are ways in which the broader global events um and perspectives are brought into our national identity with an emphasis on patriotism. And this is also aspects of the way our society lives day-to-day. Like we are a car culture. Our culture wouldn't survive or would have to change drastically if we didn't drive. Um we are a corporate consumer culture. So I've got Disney in there. Consumerism is one of the main ways we present ourselves and the one of the main ways we engage with other societies economically. Um and Disney owns like onethird of the world. So it seemed appropriate how it's become this economic model has become integrated with our American identity as well. And then we finally we also have social commentators, influencers, journalists, critics, sports figures, entertainers, and we have the stories and philosophies that are passed down to us as children through standard education. So we have the voices of our culture and the histories of our culture that often reinforce many American values. Um, and of course this will be different for every country or every group, every ethnic group or every culture in the world. So, this is just my attempt to create a collage illustrating mainstream culture in some of its forms. Here's pop culture. Again, I'm doing my best here, but I'm probably a little out of date with what's cool right this second. But this is the realm in which society is trying out new ideas, using new expressions. They're pushing the boundaries a little bit, although usually not too much. They're testing things out. They're deciding what is cool now. And some of these things will be assimilated into mainstream culture as time goes on. and other things will be rejected and become a flash in the pan as we say. And that's why we look back on some aspects of pop culture or material culture in the 80s or 70s or whatever and we laugh about it because whatever it is, big hair, shoulder pads, you know, whatever it is didn't become assimilated into our mainstream understanding of what is accepted and normal. It becomes identified with this particular pop culture moment. And so it's also where this realm is also where a lot of the corporate entities make the majority of their money which is why pop culture can be a very powerful tool in many scopes of our world and it covers everything from fashion to food trends. Subculture or countercultures. This is where the mainstream society was not meeting the needs of certain people politically, economically, artistically and so people began creating a different culture within the larger culture sometimes as an opposition directly and or rebellion to create their own identity as a polarity. Yet many subcultures later became integrated into society to different extents and more normalized. For instance, gay culture once criminalized and taboo is now a widely accepted facet of modern American life. The hippie counterculture movement of the 1960s originally developed as a protest against the treatment of um African-Americans and against the American war in Vietnam. And today this movement is not considered to be so radical. Many believe it helped move our society in a more progressive direction regarding civil rights and global policy. Um but and then also other other c countercultures that have crossed into becoming mainstream include music subcultures like um punk music, hiphop, even rock. At some point in their inception these muses music forms were seen as subversive or counter um controversial but today most people to some extent have familiarity with these art forms. um the digital world, video gaming, all of that sort of thing. Until pretty recently, was considered to be sort of a subculture, not generally considered to be cool or something that everybody did, but that has shifted a lot lately. But then there are other groups that remain more on the fringe. Um countercultures like the biker counterculture, probably due to an ongoing association with organized crime. Um and uh we also don't forget that even if a group is not thought to be a legitimate culture by society, all humans have culture. So even homeless or unhoused folks, they have their own culture. People who um are addicted to drugs, they also have um a drug culture. You know, some of these cultures may never become part of mainstream society or accepted. Um but it does, you never know what's going to happen in the future. for instance, weed legalization, uh, marijuana recreationalization and legalization has led to some aspects of that particular drug culture becoming more accepted. Um, and then up at the top there, I have a photo of of furries, which is a um, a group whose needs is al also clearly not being met by society, but are still somewhat misunderstood and subversive. Although I just want to point out that since I had a student who was part of this group at one point that they are often misconstrued as being like um a sexual fetish group when really it's um kind of a continuation of live action roleplaying. It's people who pre prefer to create their own kind of meta-ocial world with different identities within this one. Okay, continuing on then we have regional cultures. So this is my portrayal of the south as an outsider. I'm originally from California. So for a lot of us um where we come from in our country or our part of the world will determine a lot of our outlook, our views, our preferences um and our our interests etc. So it may seem to some people that people from America, the United States are kind of homogeneous. We're all the same. But obviously if you're from here, you know, we're all very different depending on what region we came from. It um means we speak differently. the environment in certain areas will influence us to take up certain pastimes or certain um traditions that other areas wouldn't. For instance, here in Florida, we have the longest coastline of any state in the United States. So, water sports, water culture, um all of this sort of thing is definitely going to happen more around here. In the south, we have um a very rich history um not only culturally with different ethnic groups that are have lived here um from Native Americans to Latin um based groups or Latin derived societies. Um but we also have um we also have uh current, you know, cultural currents and demographics that influence the the feeling, the atmosphere, the music, the food, everything of this area, not to mention how people speak. And across the world, there are diverse ways in which humans identify themselves, decorate themselves, organize their associations with other humans and choose to interact with the earth. Your race and how you perceive it is part of your cultural identity as well as your gender and your sexual orientation, your socioeconomic class, religion, profession, careers, etc. So, culture is like a lens. It's like a camera. It can affect your perception of the world. You can zoom in and zoom out. You can take a macro view like a whole country or a more micro view down to a state, um, a region, a community, a neighborhood, even a family. Culture is like a mosaic. Um, it can, it doesn't really I don't like the term melting pot because it actually makes it sound like we're all the same when really we're like a mosaic. The closer you get, the more detailed and different you see everything is, but altogether backing up, it kind of fits together somehow. Um, we usually notice culture more when it's unfamiliar to us. Um, going back to the camera metaphor, culture can color our perception like a lens. We often don't notice um don't notice it until we see people who are behaving in a way that's unfamiliar. We don't notice our own culture either until we're usually outside of it, a stranger in a strange land. And then when we come back after some time away, we may see our home in a new light. We may appreciate things we didn't notice before because we've developed perspective. And when we get to know people from other cultures and become familiar with multiple ways of being, we start to see which parts of ourselves are cultural, which are unique to us as individuals, and which are universal. Which is where we get to the point where it's important um to understand how how culture plays a role in all humans interaction with the world and gain respect for others perceptions even if we don't understand them ourselves. And if nothing else, we need to learn how to communicate effectively with members of other cultures because we live in a multicultural society increasingly and the entire society functions more effectively at every level if we understand each other. So communication is key to resolving a lot of problems in society and planning for the future. Okay, now I'm going to move on to the next PowerPoint. Okay. So, key concepts in culture studies. Part one, anthropology and culture. What is culture and how does anthropology study it? So, here are the four fields of anthropology. Biological or physical anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. And the next few slides I'm going to go into detail on each of these points. So don't wor don't worry we're going to going to cover it all thoroughly. Up at the top there is Frowns Boaz the father of American anthropology who was kind of a fun character and I'll talk about him in a minute. So first we have biological or physical anthropology. Sometimes it's called bioanthropology. And this is the systematic study of humans as biological organisms. So um they're concerned with the human with human evolution, genetics, human osteology, forensics um and primatology. So all the sub fields cover these this range of studies. So paleo anthropology looks at how we evolved from earlier hominids. Primatology looks at our closest living relatives, primates. Human genetics obviously studies DNA and is reconstructing the human genome and all of that stuff. Demography looks at populations around the world um and the different um you know medical and biological statistics that we can gather on them. Growth and development looks at how humans grow up. How our different stages of development from childhood through um aging affect us and work on making our lives better at these stages. And then we have forensic anthropology which looks at the processes that affect humans after they die. So teonomy is what that's called. and they also assist in identifying cause of death for legal and um and uh uh well for legal services. Next we have archaeology which is the study of human cultures through the recovery and analysis of their stuff the material remains and also the environmental data. So um these photos the two on the bottom right and left are photos of of my digs. That's me in the bottom right there standing up in a pit in northern Arizona. So um archaeologists are concerned with the material record of human existence. We are responsible for the discovery, excavation, analysis and storage of artifacts from the past. So that's why archaeologists hang out in museums because we have a lot of stuff to store. And um we seek to reconstruct the daily life of customs and customs of people in the past and to trace cultural changes through looking at their stuff and the different patterns of how they left it in various conditions. And we deal with prehistoric records. So before written history in the earth. Um so we call that the archaeological record. And we also look at historic um artifacts. So things that happened after written history started. And this happens in different times in different parts of the world. So some sub fields of archaeology which gets its own slide because I'm biased. We have archopatney, archo or paleobatney and paleoethnobbatney. So this studies the cultural uses of plants today and in the past by other cultures and the guy whose book we're going to be reading check uh chapters of WDE Davis he is a ethnobbotonist which is another term for this basically um and you'll learn all about that. And we have archaopedology which looks at cultural uses of soils um well it looks at soil as a source of evidence for cultural activities. Archoastronomy looks at the sky what did ancient people think about their constellations and so forth. High altitude archaeology and underwater archaeology are new frontiers because our technology is finally good enough to let us get to these places and look at the different things that humans have left. Historical archaeology as I mentioned before deals with um archaeology happening during the colonial period during the time of of written history. More recently digital archaeology works with um basically trying to u preserve and reconstruct the archaeological record in a digital uh form. So, three-dimensional or virtual reality archaeological sites to enable study and um help protect the original site, things like this. And um applied archaeology is helping to solve problems of the world today by getting archaeologists out there looking at um the ground before they build a highway or a building to make sure that nobody's going to pave over a cemetery and stuff like that. So, archaeology working to help the world today. And then zoo archaeology, which is what I do. So again that gets its own slide and um we study skeletons of animals excavated from archaeological sites. So this is a type of environmental data or ecoact as we call it as opposed to an art an artifact which is like an object that somebody made. An ecoact is an object that was left behind when they were processing food or maybe when they were building something. Um, so these sorts of things could be mistaken for just a rock or just a bone, but they're important to us because they tell us things about how ancient peoples were using their environment. And you can find out a lot about from humans dragging animals around. As my professor said once, you can track ancient climate change, ancient trade routes, migration routes, human impacts on the environment. Um, and also animals are good to think with, as Levy Strauss once said, and we'll talk in an upcoming lecture about how all the ways that humans use animals to identify themselves, mirror themselves, and um explain explain the world. So, oh, he had another bounce in him there. But that's a turkey burial, by the way, that I was excavating. Um, and I tend to study birds, so it it all depends on your specialization. And like most fields again depending on where you are in the world whether you're in a American or a British department or whatever what what your name is is going to vary. So sometimes I'm a fondal anal analyst sometimes I'm a paleozuist zarchchaeologist archaeologist etc. And here is a picture of our lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Environmental Archaeology Lab and some of our different departments and a photo of our collection manager. So um they have tours open and available to students whenever um you just need to call to make an appointment and they have regularly scheduled ones as well. They also accept volunteer applications. Okay. And then cultural anthropology is the third field. Um it's the study of the customs of human behavior and practice. And they're concerned with documenting living cultures in terms of kinship which means sex and marriage, economics and politics, religion, gender and health. And actually medical anthropology is sometimes considered to be a fifth field of anthropology on its own because it is so important helping to bring modern medical care to different cultures and make it less um invasive and oppressive and much more you know mediating and helping to mediate the impact of western institutions in medicine so that these that other cultures can get the best possible benefits without sacrificing their cultural values or um needs. Then we also have cognitive anthropology which looks at the crossover between anthropology and psychology look looking at how people think. The anthropology of art we will have a whole week on looking at how anthropologists interpret art. Um economic and political anthropology obviously very key to how humans organize their world. And then community anthropology looks at social memory and how um individual groups and places remember over time which can sculpt identity over time too. And then linguistic anthropology is the fourth field. We'll spend a whole week on this as well next week or no sorry two weeks. Um this is the study of human language and communication including ancient languages and writing systems and language preservation which is a huge issue today. So the sub fields include socio linguistics, ethnol linguistics and historical linguistics. And again we'll go into detail on all of these in a couple weeks. Okay. So to give you some background on how anthropology arose as a discipline as well as our study of culture, we need to talk about cultural evolution. So this is an outdated older idea that began um in the 18 well actually it began in the 1700s but it was the predominant idea on what culture was until about the 20th century. So this guy Edward Tyler was a a British guy like many of his time he believed that civilizations progress from savagery to barbarism to civilization. They had these all these three stages that all human cultures pass through with the apex or the pinnacle of cultural development being of course the civilization of 19th century England where they were from. And so these guys thought that all other cultures were inherently inferior both biologically which means racially and culturally because they thought that their societies were they were not fully developed humans first of all and they thought that their societies were not governed by rational thought. Um however again this outlook has been abandoned by um serious science because it assumes what it's trying to prove. It ranks culturally cultural traits rather arbitrarily and it positions individual cultures on this savagery barbarism civilization ladder which discounts their peculiarity and their integrity and it sidesteps the important task of reconstructing the unwritten histories of non-western peoples. So when we say western I'll use that a lot. We mean from Europe basically and its descended cultures. Um so we'll get into that more in a a bit. But there's also this idea that they're not rational that is misleading as well. So, the guy who turned this upside down was named France Boaz. He was a German American immigrant who founded the American School of Anthropology in the early 1900s at Columbia University as well as the Bureau of American Ethnography and the American Museum of Natural History. Um, Boaz was a really interesting guy and one of your articles you'll read about this week um by Wade Davis, same guy who wrote our book but in a different article, he's going to talk about what an impact France Boaz made on the world. Um, he did not set out to study culture. He was a linguist. He originally traveled to the far Arctic North in the 1880s to study the Inuit people's language. And he discovered that the Inuit can perceive and name hundreds of colors and qualities of seawater and water surfaces unknown in European languages. Distinctions which can be described scientifically in physics and optics and actually provided some good linguistic scaffolding for those terms when they were developed later in scientific studies. And these this type of language, these types of of terms that they had are of adaptive value to a sea mammal hunting culture. So Boaz noticed that the intellectual sophistication of the Inuit didn't fit the cultural evolution understanding of savage peoples. They had expertise and knowledge from their local history and environmental experience that Europeans just didn't have. They were far more rational than anyone acknowledged as far as how to survive and capitalize on their environment. Boaz drew on the German concept of cultor with a K, meaning local and personal behaviors and traditions to develop his idea about culture. And he thought that cultures did not follow a linear progression like the cultural evolutionist did, but that cultures develop in different ways and at different speeds based on specific local historical events and unique environmental conditions. So he called this idea cultural or historical particularism. And um again, as opposed to this idea that all cultures move through the same three stages, he thought they went in different ways on their own pace. And he took years to develop his definition of culture, but it's one we still use today. Culture is an integrated system of symbols, ideas, and values that needs to be studied as a working system, an organic whole. And um a hallmark of cultural historical particularism I'll get to in a minute is that um you need to study a culture for a long time through long periods of fieldwork. Holism is a fundamental principle of anthropology today as well that Boaz developed arguing that various parts of human society, culture, everything has to be viewed in the broadest possible context from as many different sources of evidence as possible in order to understand the interconnections and interdependence of everything in their reality. And Boaz took this seriously. Um he stayed with the cultures of the Pacific Northwest that he studied and he became part of their of their society. This is a picture of him on the left um participating in a a tribal dance and um he started a new approach to culture over the 20th century that is distinct to the United States and spread across the world from here. So um the final development of culture as a definition came from Crober and Cluckholm at UC Berkeley in the 1950s arguing that culture is a collection of behaviors that are the product of psychological, social, biological and material factors. Um and um then a later definition from Havalan which is in a textbook we use at Santa Fe. Culture is a society's shared and socially transmitted ideas, values and perceptions which are used to make sense of that experience and which generate behavior and are reflected in that behavior. So you may have noticed that instead of having a grand theory of how all humans develop, the focus has become smaller and smaller. Um Boaz himself said we should refrain from the attempt to solve the fundamental problem of the general development of civilization until we have been able to unravel the processes going on under our eyes. So the focus has shifted to studying how individuals creatively shape and reproduce culture through our own actions and an emphasis also on the meaning instead of the function of behaviors. Recognizing that the functionality of all things may not be as simple as it appears on the surface, especially from different cultures perspectives. And don't worry, you're not going to have to tell the difference between all of these definitions of culture. This is just to show you how the idea progressed and changed over time. So, ethnography was Boaz's primary data gathering method. It's the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures over long periods of time that requires often living with them and learning their language. So participant observation is the goal, a type of anthrop ethnography in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which his or her or her informants are engaged. The idea here is that to know a person you have to walk in their shoes as it were. Um and the idea is to produce emic research research that is from within the culture from the point of view of the subject like the why are they doing what they're doing from their perspective not from out an outsers's perspective an observer who may not understand exactly what's going on. So early anthropological works often had that problem. They would just describe what they saw but with no effort to kind of understand the complexities and often with this assumption that oh they're doing savage things again because they're savage. So cultural relativism is perhaps Boaz's most important contribution to anthropology which the article will talk about extensively. This means we should seek to understand other people's beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture not our own. Um and this opposes ideas of racial and cultural superiority. Um because ethnosentrism is an ongoing problem in humanity. Um and it's actually adaptive on some ways. So ethnosentrism is the tendency to view one's own culture as the most important, the most correct and the most normal and judge all other cultures by that standard. Um and again this is adaptive because um it's to to stick with what we know and develop our ideas and technology on this established basis is important right but we also need to include new experiences and wisdom from the outside and sticking with our own cultural parameters is not how we get an accurate understanding of other cultures or even of our own too. So what I do with the class when we're in person is to ask them which of these two men is more c more of a cultural being. There's a guy sitting in front of a laptop. It could be in a hotel lobby in some city, but you know, pretty western, pretty familiar to us. The guy on the right is a Kaipo Boruro um Amazon chief from the Amazon rainforest. So, um the a lot of people will instinctively say that the Kaipo man is a more of a cultural being, but actually it's a trick question because both of these people are scripted by their cultural blueprints to exist and succeed in a certain environment. And um just because we don't recognize the material culture of one of them doesn't mean that it's not there for a purpose. And if you dropped one of these guys into the other one's native territory for a while and watched them, you would quickly see that they do not have the skills, knowledge, or material culture necessary to survive in the other environment. Um so again, be be careful not to make that judgment just because one culture is more familiar to you than another. It's important to understand what people are doing from their own perspective. So a related idea is cultural determinism. Um the idea that behavioral differences are the result of cultural causes, not racial or genetic cult causes. Culture is what determines our ideas, beliefs, values, goals, and social roles, not biology. So people don't act like different kinds of people because they're literally different kinds of people. Um identity is a cultural and social construct. And this includes our perceptions of our own gender and our own race. And we'll get into these in detail. So some of these this idea may seem kind of obvious to us today that people act differently because they've been raised differently, not because they're different types of humans. But only a hundred years ago that was the norm to think that you know some people were biologically more superior and that cultural differences would reflect this. So inculturation is another important term which means the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group. And we all have been inculturated from the moment we're born and we will continue to be as we move through life, move to different cities, come into different interactions with different people, um have kids, grow up, etc. All of these things are process of incultteration. Plasticity another idea um that may seem obvious to us today but only 100 years ago was very radical and groundbreaking as the idea that all human individuals have the capacity to learn any culture or language and no human group is biologically superior to any other and no human culture is superior for biological reasons. We will return to these concepts next week when we talk about race and ethnicity and we look at the science behind these concepts. Okay. Um, briefly I just wanted to mention salvage anthropology because this is ethnography concerned with gathering artifacts or recording cultural rituals with the belief that a culture is about to disappear to collect their their knowledge for posterity. And this developed in the United States because of the presence of Native Americans who were believed to be going extinct due in part to the federal and state-run campaigns of assimilation or eradication. Um but this also gave rise to the first um anthropologists starting to advocate for native peoples, feeling uncomfortable with being um complicit in this colonization process and instead working to help record not only their cultures but to help them preserve and fight for their cultures. And um so today anthropologists generally take a stance of advocacy that began here for that reason. And today salvage anthropology is going on in other parts of the world like Central America along coastal areas that are being developed for resorts, condos, golf courses, etc. And anthropologists and archaeologists are paid to go in and do as much research or excavation as possible before the archaeological evidence and the native peoples are gone. Another idea um that connects with psychology that we'll briefly go over during the class or that'll pop up now and then is alterity. This is the idea that um all the foundation of all social institutions is this fear of the other that there is the self and there is the other me and then not me and the other is an archetype in psychology that's used to describe people whose customs beliefs or behaviors are different from one's own and may potentially be threatening or harmful. So the other can sometimes be associated as the stranger or the enemy. And Cloud Levy Strauss, a French anthropologist in Amazonia, argued that this fear of alterity um which is justified on many levels, um is the basis of social institutions. Creating kinship is how to overcome alterity. If you marry into a family, then the the guy is not your enemy anymore, you know. So, blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families. And in a couple of weeks, we'll look also at um non-western cultures, cultures from other groups around the world that expand their definition of kinship to include nonhumans. They they include animals, plants, even natural phenomenon as part of their family network. So we look at we'll look at ideas like totemis, animism, and multiism. These focus on decentering humans and look at natural uh human relationships with nonhuman forces in nature. We will also look at postcolonialism which is the theoretical approach in various human uh humanities and scientific disciplines from the 19th century onwards that is concerned with the lasting impact of colonization in former colonies. So the western world um based in Europe had colonized most of the globe. Um by the the 19th century onwards some of these um countries many of these countries were starting to achieve independence. And so in the last 100 years or so around the world, we have these countries that were modeled uh forcibly many um after European societies, but now have new social groups of politicians, community leaders, and intellectuals who are studying their own people um through this prism. and they're questioning the consequences of colonization, the plundering of their natural resources, the treating of some human groups as culturally and racially inferior, and the homogenizing and eliminating of traditions over in favor of European beliefs and lifestyles. So, we're living in the shadow of the colonial period. Postcolonialism is still an ongoing force in many of our lives, and we will look at um how these these politics play out in today today's world. Okay, part two. I'm going to get through this as quickly as possible. Cross-cultural interactions and issues that can arise. So, coming back to communication, let's look at etiquette briefly. Um, etiquette is a customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular profession or group. Synonyms, so words that mean the same thing, protocol, manners, accepted behavior, rules of conduct, decorum, good form, politeness. And you may think that, oh, politeness is is just kind of a surface thing. It's not that important. But when you think about it, etiquette is really important, right? Um, nobody intends to be rude and nobody ideally and nobody wants to be considered rude. But even within our own culture, we send messages through our behavior, through our etiquette. And if you're meeting someone new or trying to set a good impression or something like that, then um it can really it can really mess things up if you don't know the proper etiquette. So, how do you behave politely in a movie theater or at the dinner table or at a job interview or maybe on a date? Um, and we can come up with probably a list of amusing things that you could do in these scenarios that are not proper etiquette. And I often have students do this, such as being on the on the phone or texting during any of these situations, you know, um, you know, but, uh, when we go into it, it's important to know how other cultures communicate for the same reasons. It's important to know how people communicate within our own culture. do make things go cohesively to make sure that you're not misinterpreted that your intentions are not misinterpreted and that people come away having a positive impression with of you. You know, that can that can make or break your life in many ways. But cross-culturally, there's a lot of of different nuances and variation in proper etiquette, right? So, one of the questions this week in the discussion was asking you to come up with a scenario cross-culturally that could hold risk of misinterpretation or misunderstanding just because people have different standards and norms of what to do. And the Pellegrino Ricardi TED talk that you'll look at talks about this as well. So, just to briefly go over this, how do you greet people? Do you give them a handshake, a kiss, or a bow? Do you greet people formally or informally? Do you have to greet them in a certain order or um call them by a certain honorific if you're addressing for instance men or women? Um do you make eye contact or not? Is it okay to touch people or not? How much personal space should you give them? Um is it okay to touch people's children or their pets or their possessions? Um dining, that's a big one, right? Is it polite to when is it polite to eat or not? And how much? Whether you clean your plate or not or not, which utensils you use, your body position while eating, whether you make noises while eating or eat with your hands or not. Is tipping rude? In some cultures, tipping is expected. In other cultures, tipping is very rude. Um, clothing. What do you wear in academic versus professional versus street environments or maybe in a religious setting versus in your home? How much of your body or your hair should be shown? Do you remove your shoes indoors or not, etc.? Um, speaking and interacting. What is the polite way to to interact with people? Is it okay to cut people off? Um or do you need to let them finish? And what kind of body language is expected in in cultures? You know, some cultures are more verbal, others are more expressive than than others. Some cultures rely a lot on hand justiculations and movement, others less so. It's it's considered inappropriate. Um much of the world has a left hand taboo. you don't eat um with that hand and you don't greet anyone with your left hand because it is the hand used in the bathroom. There's different hygiene standards, many of which depend on people's access to clean water and sanitation. So, this affects cultural parameters as well, obviously. Um, everyone around the world thinks Americans take too many showers because we kind of, you know, take for granted that we have hot running water whenever we want it, most of us. Um, driving differences. Pelgro Bardi will give you a lot of amusing scenarios of different rules when you're driving and also different cultural standards of whether it's okay to break the rules or you know bend them and then um what are you know some real world understandings of problems that can occur. Some of these are much more serious than simply misunderstanding or having the wrong shirt on because you can have serious miscommunications with law enforcement if you don't know how to interact with them. airport protocol, um legal proceedings, you know, misrecording or misrepresenting people's interests or their intentions. All of this stuff can again be life-threatening if in the wrong if it happens in the wrong um environment. And of course, a lot of this comes down to people's most deeply held values. How do they treat their children? How do they treat animals? Um what do they eat? Etc. So, um there's just so many situations that if you think about it, um you can you can explore and if you've personally experienced a cross-cultural misinterpretation, feel free to share and um try to explain what the underlying confusion may have been. You're not alone in this. So, all these instances are examples of culture clash, conflict arising from the interaction of people with different cultural values, behaviors, or expectations. Um and that's fairly normal and unavoidable really. And a lot of times people get it. you know, they they kind of will be like, "Oh, yeah, that's it's funny that you thought this when it was really this." And um it's it's universal. Culture shock is a little bit more serious. It's the it's um it's the same kind of thing, but it's when it causes more of a traumatic and upsetting impact on someone's life. It's a feeling of disorientation or even panic experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes. A culture shock that all of us shared recently was COVID. Actually, it was a global example of culture shock. how all of us had to suddenly re-evaluate how we moved through the world and interacted with others um because there was a an imminent force that was guiding our our decision- making in that sense. So it's the same thing if you are suddenly in another society where you cannot make yourself understood or you're feeling lost and uh maybe a little bit a drift. Culture shock can be um can be a a uh again a a not a not unexpected or unusual impact. It's commonly experienced by travelers, expatriots, and exchange students, particularly those who are staying someplace for a longer time. And it can be triggered by things that you know you're just simply not used to because you came from somewhere so different. Reme if you came from Brazil, you're probably going to really have a hard time adjusting to the weather in Greenland if you're going to live there for 6 months. You know, same with the food. you um having a hard time finding food that you can eat. Maybe if you're a vegetarian and you're in a culture that's a meat eatating culture or the frustration of not being able to make yourself understood or feeling ostracized or even out of place uh out of sorry out of place or even ostracized by how you're speaking or dressing or or you know etiquette can make people feel really uncomfortable. So um the etiquette standards and there is actually a documented psychological phenomenon culture shock and it shows the stages that people move through. So if this happens to you or it has happened to you in the past just this keeps in it helps to keep in mind that this is a normal process and even if it may happen again to know that this is a phenomenon that occurs can really help you cope with it better. So, at first, you know, everything might be new and exciting in your new place, in your new country, but then differences may set in. Frustration may um occur and become overwhelming. And at the lowest point, you may feel homesick, depressed, helpless, even panicky. Um I've been there. And then you but the the cool thing is you work your way through it. You begin to adapt. And then one day, you realize you've gone through the whole day without needing to ask someone for help or you've been able to navigate from point A to point B without help or something like that. And eventually you start to see your new place, your new country as almost like your new home. And that's funny is when you go home, you can almost experience culture shock in reverse where at the low point you may feel frustrated, angry or lonely because maybe you miss your your place in in the other country where you had worked so hard to make a place and to gain some language skills and you're having trouble readjusting. But you do readjust and you integrate what you learned and experienced abroad. And the next time you're you experience a culture shift, you're usually a little bit more resilient to it. Okay. Some other terms that are important to regard um with cross-cultural interaction. Ethnosentrism we already mentioned. That's the tendency to view your own culture as the most normal and correct and judge other cultures by that standard. Jingoism is extreme patriotism. It's hatred of other countries or nations except one's own. And it's on this spectrum below here where patriotism is fairly normal and normalized. Nationalism is uh more is a little bit more um you know uh rigid but it and it tends to pop up more in in times of conflict or war but it's also normative. Jingoism is extreme nationalism characterized by belligerent foreign policy. So wararm mongering. Xenophobia means dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries or cultures. And um if you've ever taken any Latin that can help you out here with remembering what these terms mean. Zeno means alien. Phobia means fear. Fear of aliens. Ethnosentrism is a similar thing, but it's different. Um, it means you think your culture is the best. So, ethno means culture. Centrism means center. You think your culture is the center. And every culture, every country around the world deals with these issues in their own unique ways depending on their history and their current demographics. And we have discrimination, the unjust or prejuditial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex. And it's important to keep in mind that for much of our history, the priority in society was to keep the classes, races, and even the genders separated as they moved through the world. And a lot of our infrastructure was developed to do this. Urban planning, zoning laws, educational jurisdiction, all of these system, systemic institutions that we still live within were originally designed to help reinforce systemic discrimination. A stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified idea of a particular person or thing. Um, some stereotypes are silly, you know, like blondes are dumb. And, uh, some of them are more insidious, you know, relating to people's racial or religious beliefs. Um, bigotry is an unreasonable or irrational attachment to negative stereotypes. And then we have cultural appropriation or cultural misappropriation more specifically. And this is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture. generally um when a dominant culture is appropriating from a disadvantaged minority culture. So um this includes cultural repres cultural appropriation involves toned-e representations of cultures, the insensitive portrayal of cultural items, all the use of like all-white models in like runway shows and things which just makes you wonder, you know, who's the audience for this intended um expression. And then the stealing of cultural motifs and designs without credit or homage. And unfortunately, these things are rampant in society. Although our culture is becoming a little bit more cognizant of this and thanks to social media, people are able to um speak up and point out what the problems are with these sorts of things. So, for instance, fetishizing and homogenizing women from another culture or over sexualizing traditional outfits or not respecting cultural context for items that may have been used in derogatory or racist portrayals in the past, as well as mixing up different countries and ethnicities and um just other sorts of things that communicate a general lack of respect or care for the culture. Skip a couple slides here going over that. Oh, whoops. All right. So cultural reappropriation is the process by which a group can reclaim words or artifacts that were previously used in a way that was insulting or demeaning to that group. And um there's a lot of this sort of phenomenon going on here in a lot of different industries. Um not only like fashion and pop culture, music and art, but also even the names of geographic locations. For instance, the uh the Great Slave Lake in Canada is being renamed Snowdrift Lake, which was the the translation of its indigenous name instead of naming it after the historical practice of French traders going down in there and kidnapping Native Americans to sell into slavery. All right. And then um things to be aware of or avoid in cultural research and multicultural interaction as well as in multicultural uh portrayals in pop culture. Romanticism representing reality as idealized, romantic or nostalgic. It recalls the noble savage idea. So the French philosopher Russo in the 1700s um portrayed native people. He argued that they were like children living in the Garden of Eden, that they were purer than everyone else and innocent and such. And this is, you know, maybe he was had the right he had some good intentions at the time, but today we recognize this is just another form of racism. Exoticization is related, casting the other or a foreign culture as stereotypically exotic and only valuing them because of their differences. And this is tricky because we often idealize or romanticize ways of life that we aspire to. Whether it's the lifestyles of the rich and famous for some of us or for some of us maybe it's a simpler life that we see in a bygone era or in another culture. But the trick is to understand that you're doing it and to remember that no human society is perfect. We're seeing things in the past and in other cultures often through rosecolored glasses. And the way we romanticize people often says more about our cultural perceptions or our maybe unmet needs and desires than it does about theirs. Marginalization is the treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or peripheral. So again, like they're not the main audience for a culture. They're just sort of props on the side. and also objectification, degrading a person to the status of an object to be viewed, handled, evaluated, you know, not regarded as a participant but instead as like a a subject. So, it's important for anthropologists and for all people to self-reflect on these sorts of things because especially um our society and our scientific disciplines have a history of being colonizers and caring more about objects, research or profit than it does about people. All right, and that is the close of my talk for today. Thanks for sticking with me. Um, subsequent lectures will probably be a bit shorter. Um, and let let me know again if you have any questions or concerns. I'll see you next week. Bye.