Dear Maria

personal experience of business school student taking a class in Ethnography: Yes it does.

As the Course organisers said this was a lot of anthropology to digest but I realised that midway I was able to follow and have a reasonable discussion without a prior degree or knowledge.

I would even go as far as saying that anthropology can be applied in many cases with new insights. It certainly helped my studies and development.

Kind Regards

Roland

Absolutely YES! Anthropology encompasses a hugely diverse array of aspects of human adaptations through our biology and, most importantly for modern humans, our unique behavioral methods for living in all environments of earth. There is the paleoanthropological record of our hominin ancestors (not at all a simplistic story of "progress" from simplicity-remember many of these animals flourished for much greater periods of time than we modern humans have so far) , more recent archaeology that looks at hunter-gatherer and small scale adaptations across the world where such societies no longer live, as well as the flashy larger scale socieities. Ethnography looking at how modern people live through out the world varies from methods of quantified data observations thinking about the evolution of our behaviors that are hard to see in that ~2 million year old record of our hominin past and the most recent ~60-40,000 years of modern humans to applied perspectives in relation to our concern with modern social and environmental problems. I am a scientific anthropologist, so I love these perspectives over some of the trendy, subjective post-modern approaches, but that is also a part of the field of anthropology. One of my mentors, Lewis Binford said in reference to scientific anthropology/archaeology that "Science is about expanding the horizons of our ignorance", continually looking at the areas we currently know little about to keep increasing the areas of anthropological inquiry. I also have had astonishing personal experiences in ethnographic research appreciating the profound scientific knowledge and humanity of traditional peoples. The hunter-gatherers I have worked with in the savannas of Venezuela explained to me that since I could speak their language and I celebrated their dances with them, I was also a "real human" (the term many traditional people apply to themselves compared to outsiders), but that even people who did not share those cultural practices all have two eyes, we all have one mouth, one nose, we all have five fingers, we are all the same people!  Anthropology has something for everyone in all walks of life, we're all curious about the global human family, and this is the discipline that can add richness to any endeavor we do as humans. Please do explore this wonderful field and have an exciting adventure!

Dear Maria,

you already have got some extended good answers, that I can only support but I can think of another point, which I would like to share with you. It is about expanding our perspectives on field which we take for universal or 'all humans including/concerning' but those fields are very often dominated by westerners which makes them have deep discussions but only within their own 'cultural circle' (I know that westerners dont share ONE cultural circle, but I am trying to simplify things here to make a point, so please bare with me these ethnologically incorrect expressions). I am talking about fields such as philosophy, which I study in parallel to Ethnology, but also fields of economy, health etc. are affected by our cosmological perspectives and we can only discover as much as we achieve to build connections between knods of a network we place outselves within. So eventhough philosophy for example discusses gender issues and tries to build theories to support more equal approaches, regarding gender issues, they very often dont know anything about gender diversities in other cultures, which would enrich their views sooooo much! The same applies to basically all academic fields, once you start discovering that there are many different worlds out there, once you meet them in practice, or read on them, or study them by talking to a variety of people from all corners of the world, you will also have much more ideas on how to embad you own theoretical ideas in a specifique academic field, which leads you into unknown areas but gets you closer to a holistic picture and defenetly out of some sort of ignorace that many people share due to little experience with the 'others'. So just addding to what already  has been said, it does not matter what other fields you are interested in, anthropology will only enrich you and your work will for sure profit enormously from it - I, too, want to encourage you to go on with this path, it certainly enriches me everytime I go on studying :-)

regards,

nika

Yes, anthropology opens the mind. Good to Know.

Dear María Zurera ,

As for your question, I think that Anthropology is important to understand cultures and their peculiarities, to make your mind open to understand each type of human social interaction in different cultures.

However, I do not see Anthropology unraveling the unknown, on the contrary, it makes us understand what is known. Establishes the relationship of man, society and nature.

Thanks for discussion.

Regards,

Prof. Wiltgen