Monday, May 18, 2009

The Clash of Civilizations

It's the name of the Anthropology class I took this semester; and, a week after the final paper was due, I am still struggling on this final paper. Maybe it was because that the topic was so open and I always want to crunch in more information and more theories. The good thing about Anthopology, compared to other humanity disciplines such as history, economics or political science, is that it really does well on the interdisciplinary nature of events, and has a better self-criticism than those subjects. Anthropology was designed to be self-critical of the subject it studies, because in colonial person when the discipline was founded, it aimed to deal with "uncivilizaed societies", while history, economics and political sicnece to deal with the winner of the civilization wars, and inherently has speak for the social system it examines. It gets interesting when people start to apply anthropology on the "civilized societies" and found out that they are no better than the "salvages". Most notably Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema"

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