Anthropology
In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. Anthropologists study these categories broad, narrow, present, and past to try and find out what exactly a "way of life" was for individual cultures. By studying these cultures Anthropologists try and deduce different methods of survival. They have also discovered a few major social institutions that all cultures have a common bond together. These social institutions are the basis for which culture is founded. In order for a culture to become distinct from other cultures it has to apply different rules and change around these institutions. Anthropologists use these social institutional changes to understand the development of a culture and their way of being. They research these processes through fieldwork mostly. By using fieldwork as a means of research they can directly observe, interview, survey, and then analyze the situation. This gives them the advantage of seeing with their own eyes what happens within a culture
Our group lives in a market type of economy. In our market economy, the excess goods and services are bought and sold using a numerical currency system. The currency is given value through exchanges of services. This differs than that of the Nuer tribe in the actuality that they have a more personal exchange system and trade with families and friends. In our society, exchanges of goods and services are mainly with people we have no previous contact with. They do not build their own shelters, make their own clothing and most of the time donít produce and make their own food. This differs immensely from other subsistence groups and how they manage their economic systems. It may seem that our culture is considered superior to others. This may be true in some aspects but we can learn a lot from other cultures and their way of living. Time will continue making new varieties of cultures and make them unique from one another and will help other cultures and their prosperity to learn from past and current cultures. How a group gets enough food to survive depends on subsistence style. How a group deals with the surplus of food forms their economic structure. What the culture does with the surplus is make an abstract value to the real goods that can be entwined within each other. As with subsistence styles, anthropologists have come up with three different styles of economic systems: reciprocity, redistribution, and the market. The same rules follow as subsistence styles in saying that the more compound the subsistence style the more compound the economic system. . Fieldwork and the analysis of the fieldwork will be the basis on which this paper will investigate the social institution of subsistence and economics among a subgroup of our culture. Production, distribution, and consumption are the three major areas involved in economics. Since our subculture does not produce their own
Some topics in this essay:
Anthropology Life,
Islanders Malaysia,
Nichole Elizabeth,
Colorado University,
Trobriand Islanders,
subsistence styles,
subsistence culture,
produce own,
jobs parents pay,
specialized labor,
obtain food,
economic systems,
exchanges services,
jobs parents,
19 lives,
division labor,
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Approximate Word count = 1280
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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