Thinking Like an Anthropologist: A Practical Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the best introductory textbook to anthropology that I've read so far, and was recommended to me by a friend who teaches first-year anthropology (my second-favorite is Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology, which also tries to ask questions, but not as broadly).
Rather than giving student a pat list of human domains (economy, family, government) and the same old "exotic" practices of African hunter-gatherers - and all of this straight out of the 1950s - Omohundro actually teaches students how to think like a modern-day anthropologist: by asking questions, and looking at one issue from many angles.
His 11 questions are, briefly:
* What is Culture?
* How Do I Learn About Culture?
* What is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
* Do Other Societies Do Something Like This?
* What Was This Idea or Practice Like in the Past?
* How are Human Biology, Culture, and Environment Interacting?
* What Are the Groups and Relationships?
* What Does That Mean?
* What is My Perspective?
* Am I Judging This?
* What Do the People Say?
Using his own experience studying Newfoundlanders in Canada, as well as a large variety of exercises that can be done in class or as homework, he encourages students to ask these questions about the world around them, and in doing so, learn how to think like an anthropologist. Well done!

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This exciting new text teases out the common core of the cultural anthropological way of thinking, makes it explicit in a set of eleven questions, and uses those questions to enhance learning. Each question receives treatment in a brief chapter, accompanied by several exercises and classroom demonstrations.The textbook is intended to be accompanied by—and applied to—a reader, a few ethnographies, or a monograph with topical focus such as language, globalization, technology, art, or gender. The eleven questions that organize the text can be applied singly and cumulatively to address the cultures presented in the ethnographies or case studies chosen by each instructor.A comprehensive guide written by John Omohundro assists instructors who adopt this novel approach and suggests numerous examples of ethnographies and readers that would be effective companions for the text.

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