University Anthropology Essay: Ethical Risks, Culture and Identity

This essay explores key themes in cultural anthropology, beginning with the ethical risks anthropologists face during fieldwork, including issues of informed consent, potential harm to research subjects, and the influence of researchers on communities. It then delves into the concept of culture in the 20th century, examining cultural lag, adaptation, and maladaptation, alongside the evolutionary perspectives on culture and social learning. The essay concludes by discussing the concept of identity within anthropology, highlighting its connection to culture, worldview, and the impact of globalization on identity formation, emphasizing the interplay between sameness, uniqueness, and cultural dimensions. The essay draws upon various scholarly sources to support its arguments and provides a comprehensive overview of these central anthropological themes.

Running head: CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

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Essay 1
The role of anthropologist has been received in a different way over time according to the
changing theoretical perspectives. Cultural relativist for example tends to take a strong stance on
not engaging into complex ethical issues at the fieldwork. The essay will describe the ethical
risks anthropologists encounter in field work (Lederman, 2016).
However the explanation regarding the type of ethical risks encountered by
anthropologists at fieldwork have been related to the number of distinctive attributes of
ethnographic investigation. According to von Unger, Dilger and Schönhuth, (2016) the high
degree of existential engagement which characterizes anthropology research tend to describe one
of the major ethical risks encountered by anthropologists during field research. Plemmons and
Barker (2017) have noted that anthropology research primarily involves extended experiment
shall engagement of the researcher in a particular cultural context. Anthropologists have the
potential to explain associations are attitudes or even social events by seeking connections to
other form of occurrences in an explicit analytical whole. However as it is highly essential to
decide the specific context which draws utmost relevance to making implications of the matter at
hand, on the contrary to majority of market research which has been deliberately less focused
with lower degree of intentions in addition to extensive term. Secondly ethnographic exploration
typically involves socialization with a punishment.
Comprehensive studies of Awah (2017) have claimed that concealing elicit elements and
questionable individuals from governmental authorities for being encountered with questions in
order to represent less influential or powerless individuals to influential ones our further
encountering eminent personal violence have been identified as fundamental components of the

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ethnographic experience. As a result, anthropologist often encounters ethical risks such as the
above factors and thus requires certain guidelines in order to draw upon ethical dilemmas. On the
other hand, drawing contradiction to experiments or surveys in which the research intervention
has been considered to be temporarily restricted along with standardized domain of subject
release along with protocols can be applied anthropology at this point tends to emphasize on
procession investigation. As a result, the ethical risks during the anthropological fieldwork
continue to be persistent and further unfold in real time and space. Moreover, anthropology
primarily entail determined role playing along with interactional deception by drawing unique
contradictions to the interactional state which individuals apply in daily life.
Furthermore, Pink and Lanzeni (2018) have noted that cross-demands of contemporary
anthropology field work are severe which tend to induce anthropologists to successfully treat
host individuals as ‘subjects’ rather than considering as fellow individuals whose self-regulation
must be appreciated. However, anthropologists share a primary ethical obligation which is to
mitigate harm to the lives, communities or settings which they explore or which may be
influenced by their work. According to von Unger, Dilger and Schönhuth, (2016), such an
obligation involves not only the avoidance of direct and immediate destruction but further sheds
light on the obligation to consider potential outcomes and impacts of an anthropologist’s
research on other communities and settings. The primary obligation tends to supersede the aim of
seeking new understanding and further can lead to decisions not to assume or further to
discontinue a research. Additionally, majority of anthropologists are supposed to maintain their
supreme obligation to research participants. For example, under certain research conditions
specifically the ones involving contract research, it may not be possible for anthropologists to
comprehensively guarantee research participants’ desires and interests. According to Lederman

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(2016), in these scenarios, anthropologists would be well-advised to think in advance whether
they should practise that particular piece of research. Furthermore, anthropologists tend to
develop collaborative and interdependent dealings with, among others, research participants and
professionals. Plemmons and Barker (2017) have noted that these changing relationships have
the tendency create contradictory, competing or divergent ethical obligations, signifying both the
relative vulnerabilities of diverse individuals, communities, settings or populations in addition to
the inconsistent ethical frameworks of collaborators demonstrating other disciplines or realms of
practice. Moreover, in the field of anthropology it is an obligation of the interviewer to inform
the interviewee of their obligations and rights under any exclusive rights or data protection laws
of the particular nation where the research has been taking place. Krause (2017) has cited an
example of an anthropologist whose work has focused in recent years on the unlawful sale of
human organs. It has been noted that in her research the anthropologist has openly desecrated the
association ethics code’s rules which required comprehensive disclosure to research subjects, and
protection of their anonymity.

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References
Awah, P. K. (2017). Tackling Strangeness while Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork by an
Anthropologist in Africa: A Narrative from Cameroon. Journal of Historical Archeology
& Anthropological Sciences, 1, 00028.
Krause, U. (2017). Researching forced migration: critical reflections on research ethics during
fieldwork. Refugee Studies Centre. Working Paper Series, (123).
Lederman, R. (2016). Fieldwork double-bound in human research-ethics reviews: Disciplinary
competence, or regulatory compliance and the muting of disciplinary values. The ethics
rupture: Exploring alternatives to formal research ethics review, 43-72.
Pink, S., & Lanzeni, D. (2018). Future anthropology ethics and datafication: Temporality and
responsibility in research. Social Media+ Society, 4(2), 2056305118768298.
Plemmons, D., & Barker, A. W. (2017). Anthropological ethics in context: an ongoing dialogue.
Routledge.
von Unger, H., Dilger, H., & Schönhuth, M. (2016, September). Ethics reviews in the social and
cultural sciences? A sociological and anthropological contribution to the debate.
In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 17, No.
3).

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Essay 2
Culture in the 20th century developed as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing
the range of human phenomena which cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. Particularly the
term ‘culture’ in anthropology comprises of two implicit meanings firstly with the evolved
human potential in order to categorize and represent events with symbols. Secondly, the diverse
ways that individual living in different parts of the world acted imaginatively and represented
their experiences. However, according to Watts (2015), cultural lag is identified as a widespread
societal phenomenon because of its propensity of material culture to develop and alter rapidly
while non-material culture are likely to show resistance towards change and remain
predetermined for extensive period. Faas and Barrios (2015) have noted that the adaptation stage
primarily comprise of individuals who tend to develop a realistic understanding similarities and
divergences between home cultures and the new cultural patterns.
At this juncture, Watts (2015) has noted the way several cultural anthropologists ridicule
or disregard the notion that human behaviour is adaptive and gain in citing instances of of what
seem like unpredictable and subjective differences between cultures. However, such cultural
foibles tend to show maladaptations. Most evolutionary social researchers assume that
maladaptive behavioural patterns mainly emerge as the environments whereby modern humans
live show significant divergences from the settings in which humans have grown. According to
Santoro et al. (2018), culture is shaped by the developed information-processing possessions of
human brains. Such possessions in the view of Stein and Stein (2015) have been formed in
Pleistocene-epoch conditions to enable them to give rise to certain adaptive behavioural patterns.
Faas and Barrios (2015) have noted that attaining information from others facilitates individuals

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to rapidly as well as efficiently acclimatize to a extensive array of environments and further
opens a threshold into intellect of individuals, which further give rise to maladaptive ideas. The
increase of such maladaptive ideas is regarded as conventional consequence of cultural
adaptation. Furthermore, Stein and Stein (2015) have noted that variation cannot abolish the
increase of maladaptive cultural modifications as adaptive information is expensive to assess.
However, similar debates have been applied to the modern relevance of evolutionary theory to
the human species. On the other hand, Santoro et al. (2018) have noted that equivalent processes
which aid individuals in embracing changeable environments further establishes conflicting
situations among genetic condition and cultural achievement. It is imperative to note that culture
helps individuals to attain adequate adaptive information, but has a tendency to acquire many
maladaptive personalities. However, biologists have conventionally mentioned that natural
selection tends to create greatly adapted individual as it capitalize on inclusive strength.
Moreover, Stein and Stein (2015) are of the opinion that the risk of self-interested cultural
variants can be carefully disregarded. It has been noted that assortment can undergo certain
modifications at each step in the development of the hominid roots. Such developments can
modify the rising psychological mechanism which controls the attainment of culture in order to
guarantee that maladaptive cultural variants show negligible importance. For instance, majority
of Westerners tend to assume that parents serve as primary source to children’s developed
beliefs, principles and values (Watts, 2015). Oyserman (2017) has noted that as children tend to
establish strong linkages with their parents, and in some cultural patterns parents are likely to
make exhausting efforts in order to shape their philosophies, principles and outlooks of children.
On the other side, Stein and Stein (2015) have noted that children not only obtain cultural
insights from their parents but also from other adults. At this juncture, immigrant children in the

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Canada are likely to learn English from their peers and show greater inclination toward English
language rather than their native language. However, in other domains, communication from
non-parental adults to children also become decisive particularly when formal education is
significant (Santoro et al., 2018). Nonetheless, as moderate amounts of non-parental influence
facilitate maladaptive cultural variants to increase authors shed light on the grounds to which
selection tend to shape the psychology of social learning so that children preferentially attend to
their parents. Drawing relevance to the above factors authors have noted that social learning is
mainly related to attaining adaptive information from the neighbouring social environment.
According to Faas and Barrios (2015), social learning is identified as another element of learning
mechanism which makes use of cues obtainable in the social environment.
Hence to conclude, it has been argued that cultural maladaptations occur from a design
trade-off. It has been noted that culture primarily facilitates rapid adaptation to an extensive array
of environments, and further results to organized maladaptations as a consequence. Moreover, as
human populace is essential for effective cultural functioning, such co evolutionary
maladaptations are likely to be self-limiting.

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References
Faas, A. J., & Barrios, R. E. (2015). Applied anthropology of risk, hazards, and disasters. Human
Organization, (2015), 287-295.
Oyserman, D. (2017). Culture three ways: Culture and subcultures within countries. Annual
review of psychology, 68, 435-463.
Santoro, F. R., Nascimento, A. L. B., Soldati, G. T., Júnior, W. S. F., & Albuquerque, U. P.
(2018). Evolutionary ethnobiology and cultural evolution: opportunities for research and
dialog. Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine, 14(1), 1.
Stein, R. L., & Stein, P. (2015). The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft--Pearson
eText. Routledge.
Watts, M. J. (2015). The origins of political ecology and the rebirth of adaptation as a form of
thought. The Routledge hand book of political ecology. Abingdon, Routledge, 19-50.

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Essay 3
In the initial days, anthropology’s interest in an individual was reflected in the notion of
personality. The association between culture and personality was identified as an object of
exploration in the domain of anthropology. According to Cornwall and Lindisfarne (2016),
identity cannot be comprehended as the historically as well as culturally embedded self-image of
a group of individuals. Such idea of identity cannot be linked to other anthropological concepts
such as worldview, principles, ethos and most importantly culture. A clarification of recent idea
of culture not only focuses on the contemporary perspective whereby identities have been
reconstructed across the world. Furthermore, such a recent concept tends to explain the
essentiality to cite the analysis of identity in varied dimensions of social and cultural dimensions.
McDowell (2018) has noted that in globalized era, identity not only focuses on sameness and
uniqueness as these attributes cannot be defined in isolation of other cultural identities.
According to Croucher and Kramer (2017), in increasingly multicultural contexts identity
acquires its meaning specifically from the identity of others with whom self is compared.
Furthermore, any construction of identity is headed by an identification of difference and an
understanding of which determinants do not constitute self. However, such psychological
process is essentially prominent in intercultural contexts. Moreover, authors have argued that
Western study of the self has been strongly persuaded by culture-embedded assumptions related
to individuality which reflects the idea that the self can be distinguished from as well as
recognized external to the group. For example, such an emphasis has been continually emerging
in North American society where its cultural emphasis tends to shed light on self-discovery and
self-actualization. Identities are particular and distinct for every individual. As per Salman and
Assies (2017), as identity draws variance from one individual to the other, there can be identified

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as chance that a society in which an individual has its existence is not fully accepting. However,
Cornwall and Lindisfarne (2016) have stated that the social as well as cultural forces which
shape the sense of identity are not neutral. On the other hand, it operates as an influential lens
through which individuals make judgements about one and others. For instance, couvade which
is identified as a range of customs applying to the behavioural patterns of fathers during the
pregnancies of their wives and subsequent after the births of their children, is hypothesized to be
vital outcome of initial cross-sex identity followed by a perception on part of boys (Broude,
1988). Such cross-sex identity further implies that women tend to preserve control of anticipated
wealth in the adult world and then it develops to be highly decisive in isolating the roots of cross-
sex identity regardless of which the cross-sex identity must not be acquired.
Meanwhile, Cornwall and Lindisfarne (2016) have noted that the spread of cultural or
identity referents to children cannot be disregarded. However, it is identified as an object of
reflection and often negotiation between partners. Comprehensive studies of Prato (2016),
cultures are not equal with countries. Cultures do not value political boundaries. For example,
border cities such as Juárez, El Paso and San Diego tend to develop cultures in ways which draw
variance from the cultural patterns of Mexico or the United States. However, complex societies
like the United States are comprised of significant number of groups whereby individuals’
identity and from which are derived distinctive principles and norms and rules for behaviour.
Meanwhile, Salman and Assies (2017) have claimed that while speaking about commercial
culture, it is imperative to understand that while commercial culture undoubtedly recognized as
the dominant culture in recent times, yet cannot be accessed equally by all in the society.
Consequently, traditional culture is regarded as a means to shape identity and further to resist the
attraction of global culture which is often argued as local identities. According to McDowell

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(2018), the cultural elite which is often discriminated by factors of culture industry of the
metropolis is truthful in the disapproval of global culture and demands as a return to previous
national, continental and indigenous culture of African, Latin American as well as European.
According to Cornwall and Lindisfarne (2016), secondary folk culture has been typically
regenerated subsequent to their surrender to invaders or further to a global mass culture as a
deliberate endeavour to regain certain forms of cultural identity.
Thus, to conclude, contemporary popular and mass culture has to be distinguished from
traditional indigenous culture. Traditional culture tends to survive in considerably few realms of
societies which have not been touched particularly by international mass culture and in a
secondary form specifically as deliberate attempt to resist the attractions of mass culture.