Okay, let’s dive right in. If you are enrolled in either “Cultural Anthropology and Human Diversity” or
“General Anthropology” as taught by Luke Matthews, here’s what you need to do for the final paper of the
semester. Read this carefully…
In the space of between 8 to 10 pages, write an essay in which you compare and
contrast a cultural practice that you have personally experienced with an
anthropologist’s description and analysis of that same cultural practice in two
cultures other than your own.
Okay, now…let’s make sure that you understand what all that means.
How many pages are you writing? Okay, first,
you will be double-spacing and printing singlesided as usual, and the font size you choose
should be 10 to 12 point font. Second, your
paper should be formatted properly with the
correct margin sizes (Don’t increase margin
sizes! It will obvious that you are trying to make
a short paper look longer.) Your paper should be
no less than 8 full pages long and no more than
10 full pages long. Seriously, if you cannot 8
pages in this project then you are doing
something wrong, and if you have to write more
than 10 pages, you are probably including too
much extraneous stuff (edit out the extras!)
What makes it an ‘essay’? An essay is a form
of writing in which you, the author, are offering
your insights and views on some topic. This does
not mean that you are allowed to rant or simply
spew an opinion without a supporting argument.
What it does mean is that you are using your
faculties of reason to express your perspective on
some topic in a particular way.
In this instance, the goal is for you to choose a
particular cultural practice that you have
experienced and to explore that practice in light
of what you will learn about how people living
with two other cultures also engage in that
practice.
Your essay should have an introduction in which
you tell your reader what cultural practice you
will be exploring and why that practice is of
interest to you. Your essay must have a
conclusion (which should be longer than a single
paragraph), that expresses how the attitudes and
actions of people in the three cultures you looked
at are different from yet similar to each other.
Further, in that essay, you should be able to say
something about what you have learned about
that cultural practice and about your own
experience by doing this project.
What this essay should NOT be is a synopsis of
the articles that you have read. You are doing
analysis. You are not writing article summaries!
What is meant by “cultural practice”? There
are many things that we do that are biological
functions. We eat, we breathe, we sleep, we
drink various things, we urinate, we defecate, we
have sex, we give birth, we make social
connections, etc. These things become cultural
practices when we recognize their meaningful
and symbolic nature. For example, eating is a
biological necessity but in no society do people
just eat any edible or palatable thing. We eat for
far more than nutrition. Eating has meaning.
Eating one thing may be taboo in one society but
required in another. And so as with eating,
different groups of people give different
meanings to various activities…one culture may
have stigmas attached to sex but another may
regard sex in much more casual ways, and so on.
Okay, how do you do this? I presume that
you’d like to complete this project as painlessly
and in as hassle-free way as possible while
achieving the best grade and getting the most out
of doing it. If so, follow the steps below. [If not,
then please feel free to flail your arms wildly and
approach this task as chaotically and idiotically
as you would like.]
Step #1: Choose a topic, i.e., a particular cultural
practice to explore. Your topic should not be too
broad nor to narrow. Choose a practice that you
have personal experience of or with. For
example, you’ve experienced your gender, so a
paper on masculinity or femininity would be
good, as would papers on kinship, or friendship,
or family, or the place of work, among other
things. Don’t choose a topic with which you
have no personal experience, for example, if you
haven’t been in the armed services yourself,
writing about being a soldier would not be
acceptable.
Do not choose topics that are too narrow or too
obscure. Keep in mind that you have to be able
to find two articles about two different cultures
written and published by an anthropologist in
JStor to complete this assignment, and if you
choose an overly narrow topic or too obscure,
there may not be articles that have been
published on that topic. For example, you will
not anthropological articles focusing on the
rather obscure topic of keeping of pet rabbits nor
will a search for something as narrow as the
cultural meaning of red sports cars yield results.
We will be talking about many cultural practices
over the course of the semester. You may, with
one exception, write choose one of these cultural
practices as your topic. The one exception is the
human relationship with dogs – you may not
choose dogs as your topic. All other topics,
whether we have discussed them or not, are
potentially acceptable.
Step #2: Once you have chosen a good topic,
spend some time thinking about how you have
experienced the cultural practice that you are
exploring. Write some notes to yourself about
how you learned to think and feel about the
practice…Who taught you these things? When?
Why? How? How do you feel about the
experience of learning about it? Do you feel it
was good or bad? How much of your attitude
about that practice aligns with or goes against the
way that you were taught about it? How much
does the way that you were taught and feel &
think about it now accord with your society’s
norms?
As you write these notes to yourself, notice what
jumps out for you as the most interesting bit and
explore that more deeply.
Step #3: Now, once you have written a few
notes on your cultural practice of choice, you are
ready to search for your first article.
So, go to the MATC Library’s website. To find
the database that is called “JStor” (and all
articles that you use for this project must be
found on JStor) follow these steps:
[a] find & click the label marked “articles”
toward the left side of the screen;
[b] find the link “Browse databases by A to Z
list” and click on that;
[c] find the link “JStor” and click on that;
[d] If you are asked to give a user name and
password, it’s the same as those you use to
log in at any MATC computer. If you have
difficulty logging in, contact a librarian (Do
not call Luke! Call the library.)
[e] you should now be at the search page for the
JStor database. It should like the picture
below.
Before beginning your search, make sure that the
box labeled “articles” is checked as is the box
labeled “anthropology” (you can find the
anthropology box by scrolling down a bit from
the search box. By checking those boxes, your
search will written only anthropological articles
featuring research rather than, say, book reviews
or editorial pieces.
This is important! You are writing a paper
focused on cultural anthropology so make sure
that the articles that you choose are cultural
anthropological in content. They should not be
archaeological or about some topic in
biological anthropology…if you have
questions, ask me.
This is important! Do NOT choose review
articles. Each of your articles should be,
indeed must be, about research on a single
cultural group. Do NOT choose articles from
the journal called Annual Review of
Anthropology.
This is important! Avoid writing about the
society and cultures of groups that we talked
about in class. This is your opportunity to
explore other societies and cultures using the
same methods we did in class. If you choose to
ignore what I am saying here and choose a
culture that we looked at closely in class (and
when I say “in class”, this includes, for those
of you enrolled in more than one of the
courses I am teaching, what you hear in this
class and the other), you are risking a lowering
of your score.
Step #4: Now you need to find your second
article. Repeat the steps, more or less, in
step #3 but when you are looking for that
second article, try to find a society that
lives geographically far away from the
society focused upon in your first article.
Why should the second society you choose be
geographically far away from the first? If
you societies are too close together, the
likelihood is that their cultures will be too
similar and you will not have enough to
contrast. So, make your job of writing
easier and choose appropriately.
Step #5: Okay, now you’re ready to read, think
and write up your conclusions. For the
topic you have chosen (let’s say it’s
“motherhood”), how do the ways that folks
in society A talk about and enact
motherhood compare and contrast to the
ways that motherhood was and is
understood in your own society? How
about society B? How do ideas and
concepts of being a mother compare and
contrast between society A and society B?
And finally – two questions – what can
you, from your research for this project
conclude about motherhood (or whatever
your topic was) as a cultural construction?
And further, what can you conclude about
the human activity of using culture to
understand and make meaningful the world
around them?
How should you format your paper? There
are two things that are important here.
First, at the top of the first page cite by
title, date, & author and by what journal
you found the articles in, the two articles
that you have chosen to use for this project.
So, for example, the citations look
something like:
Stark, Anthony (2004) “Iron Men and Insecurities:
Masculinity and Mayhem in the Marvel Universe” The
American Journal of Imaginary Anthropology
Thefrog, Kermit (2011) “Manhood and Muppetry”
The Quarterly Journal of Anthropological
Confabulation
This project requires at least two articles
Write an essay in which you compare and contrast a cultural practice that you have personally experienced.
