The University of Tennessee Ethnographic Summary of Culture Questions

I’m studying for my Anthropology class and don’t understand how to answer this. Can you help me study?

focuses on understanding the ways that political institutions, subsistence strategies, and social systems articulate in different communities using the Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF). The HRAF is the outgrowth of an interest in cultural diversity and the need to effectively compare cultural practices across different cultures. For example, imagine wanting to know how many pastoral societies have been documented within even a single continent. Such a task would be challenging and time-consuming.

Therefore, in 1935, researchers at Yale University began amassing descriptions and data from different cultures, ultimately creating the Human Relations Area Files. Since then, the HRAF have grown into a searchable database available online (Links to an external site.). Think of it as a Wikipedia database for anthropological data. The HRAF are a remarkable resource for students interested in human behavior, as they allows researchers to search for cross-cultural comparisons. For example, a researcher could ask the HRAF to search for societies that are 1) pastoral, 2) ranked societies, and 3) have Big Men leadership. Armed with the search results, researchers could then consider what other facets of their cur cultures are similar, perhaps with the goal of identifying new cross-cultural patterns of human behavior.

For this assignment, you are being asked to provide an ethnographic summary of a culture, taking a holistic approach to understand how economy, politics, and subsistence come together within any given group. After selecting a world culture, read their Culture Summary and then answer the following questions in your discussion post to introduce that culture to your fellow students. Once you have posted, be sure to comment/respond to one other students post. Answer the following questions about the culture you selected:

1. Identify your culture and where they live. What kind of environment is present?
2. What is their subsistence strategy? Identify the primary foods that they rely on and introduce any staples that you are not familiar with.
3. Fried categorized societies as egalitarian, ranked, and stratified. What kind of social organization is evidenced in the society you chose? Explain your answer and evidence.
4. Identify the type of leadership present and the form of political organization (band, tribe, chiefdom, state). Explain your answer.
5. Consider the culture in question. How are their systems of government, rules for land tenure, and social organization supported by their economy and subsistence strategies? If they were to change to a different form of subsistence or a different form of political organization, what would change in their society?
6. When you are commenting on other student posts, compare their ethnographic summary to the culture that you selected. What makes them similar or different?

eHRAF Instructions: Navigate to the eHRAF website’s list of World Cultures, where you can review cultures alphabetically (Links to an external site.) or by looking at a map (Links to an external site.). Spend some time exploring different cultures to get a sense of the database. If you are searching in the alphabetical index, browse until you select a culture and then click Culture Summary to go to the ethnographic summary.

If browsing by map view, you click on individual icons, search by location (e.g., country or region), or by culture name if you would like to search for culture that you may have heard about in class. Once you select a culture, you will note that each culture has a name and a 4-digit identifier (E.g., Western Woods Cree (NG08) or the Qing Miao (AE05). From the map, click on the identifier to go to the culture list. Once you have selected a culture, click on the Culture Summary link to go to the ethnographic summary.