Cultural Anthropology Appreciating Cultural Diversity By Conrad Kottak

Cultural Anthropology Appreciating Cultural Diversity By Conrad Kottak

Focused on the appreciation of anthropology, the new edition of Cultural Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity offers an up-to-date holistic introduction to cultural anthropology. Key themes of appreciating the experiences students bring to the classroom, appreciating cultural diversity, and appreciating the field of anthropology are showcased throughout the text. In this edition, Understanding Ourselves chapter openers and Through the Eyes of Others boxes show how anthropology helps us understand ourselves. New Appreciating Diversity boxes focus on the various forms of human biological and cultural diversity. Appreciating Anthropology boxes are also new to the text and focus on the value and usefulness of anthropological research and approaches. No academic fi eld has a stronger commitment to, or respect for, human cultural diversity than anthropology does. Anthropologists routinely listen to, record, and attempt to represent voices and perspectives from a multitude of times, places, countries, and cultures. Through its various subfi elds, anthropology brings together biological, social, cultural, linguistic, and historical approaches. Multiple and diverse perspectives provide a fuller appreciation of what it means to be human. Newly imagined for this edition, chapters now contain boxes titled “Appreciating Diversity,”
which focus on the various forms of human cultural diversity, in time and space that make anthropology so fascinating. Some of these explorations of diversity, for example the recent popularity of hugging in U.S. high schools, will likely be familiar to students. Others, like the story of a Turkish man with fi ve wives and 55 children, will prompt them to consider human societies very different from their own.

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A key feature of today’s student body that makes anthropology more relevant than ever is its increasing diversity. Anthropologists once were the experts who introduced diversity to the students. The tables may have turned. Sometime during the 1990s the most common name in my 101 class shifted from Johnson to Kim. Today’s students already know a lot about diversity and cultural differences, often from their own backgrounds as well as from the media. For instructors, knowing one’s audience today means appreciating that, compared with us when we first learned anthropology, the undergraduate student body is likely to be (1) more diverse; (2) more familiar with diversity; and (3) more comfortable with diversity. We’re very lucky to be able to build on such student experience.

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