Cultural Anthropology Research Paper

Cultural anthropology is unique because it is the study of human kind. It strives to fully be able to understand and describe humans. Cultural anthropologists focus on four very important things in order to do their job correctly. They have a holistic perspective that they use to understand human behavior. Holism means as a whole, in order to completely understand one aspect of a culture, you have to be able to understand all the other aspects of the culture. A second important element in cultural anthropology is participant observation. Participant observation is when the anthropologist himself submerges himself in the culture they are studying. It does not mean that they are standing from afar recording what is going on, they actually engage

What is different from an anthropologist and any other career that has to do with studying people is that an anthropologist is a primary source because they are in the middle of it all, which is an explanation for the word fieldwork. Fieldwork has allowed anthropologists to better understand different cultures. Also, when anthropologists study people through participant observation there is no observer bias, or at least they try their hardest to be as subjective as possible. In turn that allows everyone else that is not able to go into the field to be able to understand different cultures and their beliefs. In my opinion, if you want to know something about a certain culture your best bet is to talk to an anthropologist that has done field work with the culture you are interested in learning about, usually the anthropologist will have published an ethnography will the information they gathered. Ethnographies like Dancing Skeletons are very informative because you are able to experience their journey second hand. Anthropologists are taught to put aside their standards, feelings, and beliefs aside because that is the only way they will be able to rightfully extract the information they need from different