Notes on Linguistic Anthropology

My Language, Culture, Cognition class has this article for the first reading and the professor offered an email with important terms which I made into a full-scale outline:

Key terms/concepts to focus on in reading the Ottenheimer chapter:

• “Ethnocentrism” vs. “Cultural relativism”
  • Cultural relativity is the idea that differences exist amoung cultural systems, that different cultural systems can make as much sense as our own, that we can learn to understand these different systems.
  • Ethnocentrism is the opposite; judging others by one’s own terms or, more subtly, not understanding different systems on their own terms.
    • using your own system to interpret what others are doing
    • insisting that your own system is the only one that makes any sense
• “Frames of reference”
  • Frames of reference are the ways we see and interpret, and understand the world; what we will notice and what we will ignore.
• What does it mean that Anthropology is both “holistic” and “comparative“?
  • Broadly concieved and comparative in nature, anthropology seeks to understand differences and discover similarities in human behavior.
  • Four-field tradition : physical, archeological, cultural, linguitic
  • Holistic because it is the only way to really understand human behavior and belives at all times and in all places.
  • Comparative refers to its goal of gathering and comparing information from many cultures, times, and places.
• “Fieldwork”
  • Fieldwork in cultural and linguistic anthropology that takes you into another living human culture where you are expected to adapt and adjust your frames of reference until you can understand and operate successfully within that cultural or linguistic system.
  • In order to translate across cultures, to interpret contrasting concepts, and to explain divergent views. (Applied Anthroplogy)
• “Linguistic anthropology” vs. “Theoretical linguistics”
  • Linguistic anthorpology goes beyond analysisng the structure and patterning of language to examine the contexts and situations in which it is used. (i.e. how it began; how it is learned; how it changes; etc.)
  • Anthropology is holistic, comparative, and fieldwork-based
  • Theoretical linguistics is focused, in that its primary goal is to describe the underlying structure of language, apart from the social and cultural contexts in which that language is used, specific, in that seeks language universals in the underlying structures of a single language, and intuitive, in that its primary data-gathering method is introspection.
• Who is (was) Franz Boas?!
  • The first professor of anthropology in the United States:
  • He made early statements about the separability of language, race, and culture taking an important stance against the growing racist and nationalist sentiments of the time.
  • He taught his students that learning the language was an important part of learning the culture.
  • He also insisted his students do extended fieldwork, dramatically improving the quality of understanding of different cultural and linguistic systems.
  • Boas’s legacy is linguistic anthropology’s continued reliance on fieldwork as a primary source for data.