last time we discussed tomorrow from traditional food systems and i just want to reinforce some key points the total authentician is located on the u.s mexico border it's about the size of connecticut it is comprised of nine contiguous districts and 11 total districts there have been many citations for the decline of traditional farming practices as well as the high incidence of diabetes toca from has pointed to the idea that farmers have ended up leaving a lot of their farms and moving to other locations over time also post-world war ii we see a real shift in uh practices on the tony autumn nation as more and more individuals are encouraged to participate in the cotton economy in the economy for export off of the nation itself also it's important to keep in mind that as traditional farming practices became less essential rainfall also became less essential to maintain lifestyle and a lot of the rituals had grown up in association with the subsistence activities so the now a tea or the rain ceremony which was used to call down the reins became no longer as as culturally important as it once was as there was a shift from um subsistence practices towards uh labor uh movement outside of the nation uh in a more capitalist or market-driven context as a whole today i'd like to talk with you guys a little bit about what anthropology is and what constitutes anthropology and anthropology aims to describe in the broadest sense what it means to be a human being the anthropological perspective is holistic comparative evolutionary and field based and anthropology can be defined as the study of the human nature human society in the human past i'm going to go through each one of the components of the anthropological perspective anthropology is holistic we as anthropologists attempt to integrate everything that is known about human beings from each of the sub fields of anthropology in order to integrate that into the highest and most inclusive level it's necessarily interdisciplinary in nature and so you have anthropologists who are working in unison with individuals from many different disciplines and in fact are crossing a lot of these disciplines themselves in their field work it's comparative in that anthropologists will consider similarities and differences in wide ranges of human societies before coming to any generalizations about human nature human society with the past it's also evolutionary and this is one of the key aspects of anthropology and i think one of the things that things that distinguishes it from many of the other social sciences is the deep historical time within which anthropologists consider change and continuity in human societies and this really comes from the subfields of biological anthropology as well as archaeology anthropology relies on the concept of culture in order to explain the diversity of human ways of life one definition of culture it can be defined as sets of learned behavior and ideas that we as human beings acquire as members of society we indeed utilize culture to adapt and to transform the world in which we live in a variety of ways in order to suit our purposes this idea of niche construction modification of the environment as well as infrastructure to suit our purposes and indeed language and learning become really key parts in that and lead to our evolutionary success throughout a deep history of our species as a whole in the united states today there are between four and five major subfields the four traditional subfields are considered biological anthropology archaeology cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology the fifth subfield is a little bit more recent edition many programs have come with applied anthropology is a focus there's a little bit of debate within anthropology about whether applied should be a unique field or whether it should be integrated across all the other subfields of anthropology in terms of the holistic nature of anthropology in an ideal world you have the different subfields of anthropology all informing one another so you have biological anthropologists who are using dot and information gain from archaeologists cultural anthropologists and linguistics in order to inform their work in here of course you can see an example of apply being a an area where everything that is known is used to focus on particular issues that are that are individuals are confronting in particular societies i now like to go through each one of the subfields or major fields in anthropology in turn and talk about them a little bit first biological anthropology this looks at human beings as biological organisms but it it does so in the context of of trying to distinguish what makes us unique from other species as well as what characteristics we potentially share with other species biological anthropologists have a number of different foci from primatologists who study non-human primates which are our closest living relatives paleoanthropologists which look for fossilized remains of humanity's earliest ancestors those that focused on human adaptability in different ecological settings which note differences in human growth is as well as development and many of you are likely familiar with forensic anthropologists which are which are shown on many popular television shows crime dramas forensic anthropologists looking at human remains a molecular anthropologist will look at chemical similarities and differences in the immune system overhaul overall science itself is a product of the time period it also reinforces a particular ideology of the time period within which it finds itself and we can see this clearly in the context of early discussions of biological anthropologists and the notion of race we think about racism as the systematic oppression of one or more socially defined races by another socially defined race that is justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule and this idea of this inherent superiority or inferiority goes to this notion of of of cognitive capacity and this was the the work of some uh early biological anthropologists who were doing things like measuring cranial capacity and you had studies that were done in both europe in the united states that uh typically found that the individuals of that nationality who were white and male had the largest cranial capacity these studies were flawed in the fact that these scientists were had an idea in mind of what they were looking for and they actually went out and found it and indeed these collections have been re-analyzed and have found no statistically significant difference between the size of the skulls and the underlying justification for continued racism based on cranial capacity and so-called scientific information anthropologists have also been at the forefront of confronting these racist stereotypes and attempting to debunk uh these racist stereotypes including franz boaz and washburn uh who really taught against these notions of of biological anthropology reinforcing notions of race and racism in the united states linguistic anthropology linguistic anthropologists will approach cultural diversity by relating varied forms of language to their particular cultural context in a real general sense we can think about language as a system of arbitrary systems that is used to encode one's experience of the world and others as a whole one of my major interests in linguistic anthropology is that the connections between linguistic diversity cultural diversity and biological diversity you can see that there on the left of the map mapping out of linguistic diversity but you can also see many overlaps between linguistic diversity biological diversity and cultural diversity linguistic anthropologists would study um not only the speech itself but how the speech is delivered the uh interaction between uh both the uh listener and the giver of speech and then all the subtle cues that individuals will look to and see if they're engaged or being engaged by the speaker and or the listener and also the notions of turn taking and power in the context of exchange and raw in terms of different specializations of linguistic anthropologists you have historic linguistics which looks at how languages change over time comparative linguistics which looks at the study of relationships in the same language family how these may have descended from a common ancestor or what is referred to as proto-language some of the more interesting uh in cutting edge research here would be new forms of communication uh computer-mediated communications uh mike wesh's work on the anthropological introduction youtube gets out a little bit of this but also how things like gender or ethnicity uh might or relative age might be able to be found out based on how people type or communicate with one another online and then again one of my major interests here with the initial the notion of linguistic preservation as we but and and revitalization as well and how linguistic revitalization ties very much into cultural revitalization this is certainly something that i saw uh to be true on the tawnatham nation overall i myself am a cultural anthropologist uh cultural anthropology in the past was uh really relegated to the so-called primitive societies where sociology was focused more on civilized societies and so this set up this sort of dichotomy between the west versus the rest and um now increasingly we're seeing this study of uh cultural diversity in urban as well as rural societies in a variety of different settings cultural anthropology aims to show how variation and beliefs and behaviors of members of different human groups is shaped by culture and again culture is a set of learned behaviors and ideas that we acquire as members of a particular society uh the fourth major characteristic of anthropology uh is that it is field based and so anthropologists engage in field work particularly cultural anthropologists uh this involves an extended period of close involvement with people in whose language or way of life anthropologists are interested in during which anthropologists typically collect most of their data these individuals that are worked with or have historically been referred to as informants this has had some negative connotations and so there are different terminology for individuals respondents teachers friends or people i work with or some of those examples in terms of another subfield of anthropology we have archaeology which can be thought about as a cultural anthropology of the human past and there's a really wide range of interests here so you have specialists in lithics that are looking at stone tools to garbologists who are looking at 20th century garbage dumps and for example the city of phoenix was able to reduce its overall waste by looking at garbology of the study of garbage and how people were throwing away things and why they were and what those attitudes were that shape that i believe was something around nine percent reduction uh in the amount of waste that was generated in the city of phoenix so this of course leads to very much applied sort of work in terms of decreasing the overall cost uh in the municipality of the city overall anthropo archaeologists examine artifacts which are portable objects which have been modified by human beings and typically you have archaeologists working and this accounts for the deep time depth here that goes beyond history to pre-literate societies so archaeologists are finding out lots of information about societies that did not use writing to communicate with one another in addition to lithics you might have experts in metallurgy or ancient pottery as well the last subfield of anthropology is applied anthropology and applied anthropologists use information from other specialties and disciplines in order to solve practical cross-cultural problems in things like health care as well as economic development so you see development anthropology some of the critique coming from the anthropology of development as well as medical anthropology utilization of biomedicine and complementary and alternative medicine for human health outcomes you can see in the lower picture here is an example of anthropometry where nutritional outcomes are being measured by measuring the relative growth of young children between zero and five years of age you have a very key time in childhood development as well as overall health of the child and so anthropometry comes into play here to look at where nutritional interventions are needed as well as the potential success of those nutritional interventions and that's just one example for medical anthropology there are entire journals that are dedicated specifically to medical anthropology and anthropologists have focused exclusively within the medical context including working for major hospitals overall in the class i think that some of the things that i'd like you to come away with particularly when thinking about world problems or or global issues is how do we make sense of our lives in relation to others and why are certain things important to you for and why might they be important to other people or not important to other people also the holistic nature of anthropology comes into play here how can we see issues as interconnected and related with one another further in our greater understanding of one another and cross-culturally how can empathy potentially be extended and greater understanding of the human condition as a whole