The discipline of anthropology is centered on the concept of culture. What we make, what we do, and what we think constitute the basic elements of culture. These elements combine in aggregates such as symbols, rituals, and social structures. Since…

LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: As European immigrants settled in the western frontier of the United States, they faced the challenge of reinventing the elements of culture familiar to them in very…

LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Anthropologists have a number of ways of studying the elements and aggregates of culture. Some approaches emphasize the development of a particular aspect of culture over time,…

LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: An aggregate is a combination of elements. What we make, what we do, and what we think all combine in larger aggregates of culture. For instance, it’s…

LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: The complex whole of culture can be broken down into three categories: what we make, what we do, and what we think. The boundaries separating these categories…

LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: In the last section, we referred to culture as a combination of materials, technologies, social relationships, everyday practices, deeply held values, and shared ideas. Nineteenth-century British anthropologist…

LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Figure 3.2 The floor plan of a typical 21st-century middle-class American house consists of many individual rooms, including three to four bedrooms, a large kitchen, a family room, and…

Figure 3.1 Now and in the past, people have called many different types of dwelling home. Top left, tent on K Street in Washington DC; top right, Puye cliff dwellings near Espanola, New Mexico; bottom left, a water village, Brunei, Indonesia; bottom…