Anthropology and Intercultural Relations

A thorough understanding of the international community requires an ability to learn and deal with intercultural relations: the flows of symbols across the global landscape, facilitated by transnational migration, new information technologies, and global markets, which can lead to creativity and innovation but also to misunderstanding and conflict. Lacking a bounded subject matter, anthropology is defined instead by a common perspective, a particular way of looking at human activities. This anthropological perspective can be said to be comparative, holistic, empirical, evolutionary, and relativistic. The concept of culture reminds us that people’s symbolic worlds are just as real as the material conditions in which they live; in fact, people only apprehend the empirical world through learned models of reality. The contemporary world is a world of encounters across national, social, and cultural borders. Understanding culture is crucial to understanding human behavior at every level, from the individual to the nation-state, in an increasingly globalized world.

Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture