Meaning and Importance of Cultural Anthropology Essay

The af confinesath of Globalization leaves the anthropological-ethnical world not tho in pieces, as one of the most trained anthropological analysts of the time, Clifford Geertz, postulates, but in dust A seemingly atomized, incoherent mesh of individuals, who digestt be attributed to a specific ethnic background any much, and who are barely representative members of the province-states which issue their passports. By all traditional measurements, this conglomeration of individualized human being should not be able to organize its flavour in any orderly way.A walking(prenominal) look at the life-organizing forces of today reveals a growing strength of market powers as employ by global business and a dwindling contribution to life-structuring issues from political and social aggregates. Ethnic free radicals as free-living formations (if ever they could be considered as such) have become obsolete since colonialization. In the wake of globalization the term used for the afte r-effects of a development that has been powered by the seemingly unlimited chance to spread out, nation states are rapidly losing their life-formatting influence.But the planet is limited, and so is the growth of all organizations running on secular underpinnings. When we apply any analysis of the recent conditions of this planet (with humans as a major factor) to the know concepts of culture, the results are disastrous. Without societal offers for identification as a valid member of a social entity, and, logically following, no security promise for the future, this condition of disconnectedness from any form stability whatsoever can only lead to a fatal conclusion. A survival of the fittest- future seems inevitable.Surprisingly, the world doesnt very look wish this. But whats been happening? What is the new undiscovered organizational structure, which keeps things from falling apart(predicate) into a dog-eat-dog society? Cultural theories cant offer an explanation, nor do pol itics provide a satisfying answer. Natural sciences, the oracles of our last few hundred years of existence, turn their heads towards the catastrophic results of their parent societies and how to speak them, with few optimistic predictions, so far. And what of the Cultural Sciences?What is their outlook and how do they justify their right of existence, if their field of work, organized human society, doesnt present itself as such anymore? For the Cultural-Anthropologist, or for the Ethnologist, extinction might be on the horizon approaching at a speed concurrent with the vanishing of their subjects. How much longer allow for it be doable to satisfy any money-provider with rational innovations that, preferably, pay flattering tribute to the self-ascribed god like standings of the actual human race? Plainly spoken Who will need Ethnologists, if there are no more ethnic novelties, no more ethnic boundaries and ethics?Lets try to tackle this task with the gibes of our own trade. W hat if new heathen ethics are emerging? Maybe they come with contrary ethnic boundaries. So what? And how much greater can an ethnological novelty be than news just about the emergence of a new cultural group, perhaps a new cultural level or even an evolutionary step in its cultural iteration. in that respect exists just such a group revealing itself to anyone, who is willing to see it. Sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson dubbed it the Cultural Creatives, and I believe the have-to doe with is apt.Creativity isnt a thing that can be organized. Global modern society arrived at its current point by means of organizing its relationship to its surroundings. With no more physical growth possible society is now facing the challenge of organizing in relation to itself. It I should say we are doing it as we speak. But we dont notice it happening through our scientific observing eye, which is used to view a purely material world sooner we assume by indirect e mpirical phenomena the initiative that a non-materialistic reality might be in existence. The tools for measurement are lacking.But human hunch serves to make it palpable. Intuitive knowledge cannot be transferred into objective matter, which would be required by the sciences, but calm it can be felt. Humans have probably always felt it, but the easy woof of materialistic life-organization has prohibited it from gaining much importance during the period we call Modernism. Forced to deal with the consequences of a situation, in which inner relations to ones self with its analog connection to its environment become dominating again over the modernist dichotomy and relativistic relationship towards a surrounding.As a result more people pay more respect to their feelings and intuitions. And their lives are oriented to intuition-based knowledge once again rather than to a static, materialistic reception of the environment. This viewpoint is not abandoned either, but, worked through a nd transcended, now to be used as a wonderful tool whenever needed. This change on the cultural playground of the early 2000s is palpable- feelable for anybody who is willing to make the practical experience himself.And practical experience comes through creative participation with this life on earth, rather than through indirect and empirical participant observation, which is, unfortunately, still the most prominent tool of the cultural anthropologist. Creative participation means more than the collecting of evidence it means creating and acknowledging its own cultural footprint, as well. The creative participant is entering into a situation with an inherent risk the risk of becoming a part of the things that are going on around him and which are co-created by his or her presence.There is no convenient non-responsible observer position left anymore, but an interwoven entanglement with all and in everything and this entanglement makes one able to feel what reality is about- even if one cannot put it into words, on picture palace or even express it in thought. In such an entangled position it makes no signified to separate ones own fate and feelings from the fate and feelings of others. Those times are over, if, indeed, we ever really witnessed them before.For science to coax a true picture of true reality of the culture one is living in, it is necessary to accept a way of recognizing the world in a more than materialistic manner. A wind-chill-factor of sorts needs to be built in into the static observations of todays theories, which are stuck in their own limited word meaning of dynamism. The only appropriate approach towards cognition of culture-in-the-making seems to be through Creative Participation, where a separation amongst the observer and the observed is completely voided for good, where feelings and realities are shared practically and equally by all.Cultural Anthropology with its overlap fields of interest into all sciences on campus, its fi eld-experience for discovering a cultural merge first hand, and its ties to development politics, cultural exchange and education programs worldwide might be predestined to explore into a reality, which isnt measurable, countable, or even describable but in existence and palpable all around us.