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Submitted by dseguineau on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
- Category: Social Issues
- Words: 1476
- Pages: 6
- Views: 20
- Popularity Rank: 5317
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Anthropology: the study of all aspects of human life and culture. It examines such topics as how people live, what they think, what they produce, and how the interact with their environments. Anthropologists try to understand the full variety of human diversity as well as what all people share in common. They ask such basics questions as: When, where, and how did humans evolve? How do people adapt to different environments? Much of the work of anthropologists is based on three keys concepts: society, culture, and evolution. Together, these concepts constitute the primary ways in which anthropologists describe, explain, and understand human life. The theoretical approach that will be the focus of analysis in this essay is the comparisons and contrasts of daily important rituals and ideologies that the San, the Yanomamo, the Sherpas, and the residents of New York City share in different parts of the world.
The Bushmen, also known as the San, live in Namibia in the Kalahari Desert. Their ritual and attitude towards the supernatural and the spirits, who are thought to bring sickness and death, is widely accepted as the general structure and for which their art should be understood. In fact, paintings were closely associated with the activities of Bushman shamans at medicine dance rituals. A shaman is someone in a hunter-gatherer society who enters a trance in order to heal people, protect them from evil spirits and sickness, predict the future, ensure good hunting and generally try to look after the well being of their group. During a trance dance, women, usually sitting around a central fire, clap the rhythm of special songs. The men rely on intense concentration and highly rhythmic dancing to enter a state of trance. The most important is curing people as well as unperceived disease. They lay hands on all present to draw sickness out of people and into their own bodies and then exorcise it. Other important tasks performed in trance include rainmaking....
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