My Final Presentation on Anthro Theory, Mainly Boas and Cultural Relativism...in Chinese, of course

人类学的社会演变理论

今天我要跟大家讲的是人类学的社会演变理论。这个题目的范围很广，所以我就谈一谈三个部分：第一个是人类学最早的演变理论，第二个是这个理论受到的批评，然后最后给你们举一个语言人类学的例子。

根据人类学最早的理论，每一个社会的演变都一样。当时人类学家觉得能够创造社会演变的分类。关于怎么把社会的演变分类，有很多不一样的看法，可是他们都差不多同意把社会的演变分类能表示出每个社会的进步程度，他们也能根据这个标准说某个社会比别的社会好。

事实上，这个最早的人类学理论不知不觉地受他们的社会的影响，所以把社会演变分类的时候，他们总是把自己的社会归类为最进步的社会。有一位人类学家对这点批评得很厉害。他的名字是 Franz Boas。他提出来一个新的想法。根据他的观念，每一个社会有它自己的演变，所以没办法分类。再说，每一个人的看法都受到他所处社会的影响，人类学家也不例外。

我要用一个例子让你们清楚一点。我刚才提到的人类学家，Boas，对人类学的贡献很大，尤其是在语言人类学方面。他写了一篇很重要的文章。这篇文章是对别的文章的回复。有一篇文章分析了几种印第安人的语言。根据这篇文章，几种印第安人的语言常常用几个不一样的词汇表示一样的意思。从这位语言学家的观点来说，印第安人语言的进步程度比西方语言的低。Boas批评我前面所提到的那篇文章。他提出会有这样的结果是由于语言学家听错了。是事实上这些词汇的声音都一样。一个人怎么听一个声音，要看他们的母语是什么。那就是说母语不同的人有不同的听声音的方法。换句话说，每一个研究都受研究者的文化影响，所以他们不知不觉地误会了别的文化，语言，什么的。他提出来的这个观念，文化相对性，是一个人类学理论的根本原则。

我的演讲说到这里，谢谢大家。

I'm too tired to translate it...you can always try plugging it into google translate, however horrible a result it might be...

The National @ National Taiwan University

2014: Applied Anthropology, Chinese New Year, Yilan, and Food (of course)

I feel like I've finally had time to breath for the first time in 2014. It's the Chinese new year, so I have about a week off from school. Before that I was busy juggling school and a part time job that someone hired me for over LinkedIn (so for all you people that say LinkedIn is useless...). I was conducting interviews around Taipei with retailers about some of the products they were selling. I wish I could be more specific but they seem pretty strict about what I'm allowed to post online. In any case, it was a great learning experience for me. All the interviews were in Mandarin, so that was really challenging, but I also picked up a lot of new vocabulary. This is also the first time I'd gotten a job that had me directly utilizing the skills I developed by studying anthropology in college (so for all the Yahoo! articles that say it's useless...). I conducted interviews, wrote field notes, took photographs, and wrote up a report on my findings...hey wait, that sounds like my Research Methods class!

One thing I did not like about the job was how I can only divulge the information to my employer. The ethics of this kind of work is something I've been thinking a lot about, because the information is not shared and I am assisting an American company potentially gain a leg up in the Taiwanese market. In any case, I've been doing a lot of background reading on not only the ethics of business anthropology, but also the history and practice of it (National Taiwan University's library has a pretty decent anthropology section in English). These books have also been dropping a lot names that I'm going to follow up on as I try to work out where I should go to get my master's degree.

I finally wrapped up this project near the end of January, and classes ended about a week after that, so I was free to set off for Yilan to spend the new year with my old host family. I brought them a homemade cheesecake (my host sister loves them) and Krispy Kreme, which finally didn't have a line that was five hours long (it just came to Taiwan in December and has been hugely popular...I feel like walking around with a box of Krispy Kreme has become a fashion trend or a status symbol somehow). We had a huge dinner of several dishes, some made by my host mother, some by her mother, and some picked up from Costco. There was chicken, fish, turnips, pork, mushrooms, and fish ball soup.

After eating, we went to stop by and visit both of their grandparents' homes, which are just around the block. Once there, the kids all received red envelopes and lotto scratch cards. Then we went to Luodong night market to cash in the scratch cards and get some snacks and dessert (like crushed ice with green tea tofu pudding and red beans at Bao Xin Fen Yuan, yum). The next morning, we went to 三山国王 (San Shan Guo Wang, Three Mountain King) temple to usher in the new year by lighting incense sticks and eating free bowls of congee with picked vegetables. So far, I'm pretty pleased by 2014.