Read articles and answer the questions.

  For this week you have four chapters in Agar: “Similarities and Differences,” “Situations,” “Culture,” and “Speech Acts.” Please answer any ONE question from EACH of the four chapters (that is, four total answers). Please answer them in a single post.

“Similarities and Differences”

1. What is the role of similarities in grasping cultural differences?
2. What are the two problems facing every student of cultural differences?
3. What does Agar mean when he says to “put the content first”?

“Situations”

1. Why does Malinowski say translation is impossible without ethnography?
2. What is the difference between the “utterances” studied by linguists and philosophers, and the “discourse” studied by Malinowski?
3. Can you think of an example of an utterance whose meaning changes if the situation changes?  How about an example of utterance whose meaning depends on the situation, so it doesn’t mean anything unless you know the context?
4. What does it mean to say that language (and culture) is used by people to dothings (as opposed to just meaning things)?  What kinds of actions can you perform with language or symbols?

“Culture”

1. Why is it difficult for anthropologists to define culture in a way they can all agree on and use?
2. What point is Agar trying to make in the following passage?
   • “Culture is supposed to be an answer to the problem of understanding differences.  But it’s supposed to be an answer, not a label that hides the question.  Not all differences are cultural, because people do things differently within the same languaculture.” (p. 125)
3. What does the following passage have to do with the concepts of “pattern,” “holism” and “coherence”? 
   • “Difference was just attributed to identity.  Instead, it was investigated as the visible tip of an invisible iceberg.  The trick is to find out how the difference is related tp other differences, to assemble a coherent picture of how they all fit together to make up a grand difference between you and them, a difference that leads to a different way of seeing and doing things.” (pp. 127-128)

 “Speech Acts”

1. What “conditions of felicity” do Coleman and Kay find apply to lies in their experiment?  Which of these is the most important?  Which is the least important?
2. What are the components of Dell Hymes’ SPEAKING model?
3. What does it mean to have different kinds of truth?  How can truth and lies be speech acts?
4. What three characteristics of frames does Agar give?
5. What does Agar mean by this:
   • “The kinds of rich points you notice in discourse depend on the kinds of expectations you have, and the kinds of frames you use to build to solve the problem will depend on which expectations need changing.” (p. 161)

Learning About CulFor this week you have four chapters in Agar: “Similarities and Differences,” “Situations,” “Culture,” and “Speech Acts.” Please answer any ONE question from EACH of the four chapters (that is, four total answers). Please answer them in a single po“Similarities and Differences”

Learning About Culture