…on a feminist website. (Well, sort of, it’s more just etymology with a cultural dimension, but anyway.) I love her run-through of trying to explain “Damn” and “pardon my french” to a non-native speaker. And the concluding paragraphs: …if there are words and phrases that I use, but haven’t actually thought about — idioms that [...]
Posts Tagged ‘culture’
Applied Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistics
“…we cannot study languages effectively apart from their cultural context… …linguistics is not so much a part of psychology, as most contemporary linguists believe, as part of anthropology, as Sapir believed (in fact, this could mean that psychology itself is part of anthropology…) Linguistics apart from anthropology and field research is like chemistry apart from [...]
Culturally Informed
22 Jan 2010 at 13:36
by Adam
in Anthropology
tags: aid, anthropology, culture, haiti, NGOs, Politics, Society
“…collaborative, culturally-informed aid must replace the age-old top-down kind of aid.” From this anthro blog post on understanding the people you’re trying to help and helping them in ways that are best for them instead of imposing your own assumptions. Here is what poor Haitians define as elements of a good society: 1. relative economic [...]
Finding the best path by ceasing to look
The “second summer of love” in England has had a profound impact on my life. The rave/dance scene that grew out of it bequeathed the world most of the music I found fascinating for about a decade from 1997 to, say, 2006-ish. Certainly much about me morphed and changed over that period, but electronic and [...]
A Collection of Thoughts on Adulthood, Science, and Philosophy
11 Dec 2009 at 15:43
by Adam
in Anthropology
tags: adulthood, anthropology, culture, education, Philosophy, Politics, schema, wine
TL;DR version: “Truth” is beyond the ken of human experience; we just tell stories and do the best we can. To me, some definition of adulthood should include awareness of life as consisting largely of a number of scripts, and a realization that we can write our own. Connoisseurship of wine is an example: we [...]
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