The Struggle of Past Identity in Modern Lebanon Essay

The Struggle of Past Identity in Modern Lebanon - Essay Example Using methods from both the sciences and the humanities, anthropology helps us to understand the world around us. Anthropologists work in a wide variety of settings around the globe, including rain forests, high-altitude environments, rural villages, and large cities. (Headrick 2007) Anthropology studies all facets of society and culture is it tools, techniques, traditions, language, beliefs, kinships, values, social institutions, economic mechanisms, cravings for beauty and art, struggles for prestige. This includes, by way of example, but is not limited to Linguistics is the study of human languages, their synchronic structure,and their diachronic evolution, and linguists dedicate themselves to the description and documentation of live and extinct languages. Linguistic Anthropology is the study of the interrelation of language, culture, and human cognition. It describes the impact of humans on other humans. It basically studies human characteristics generated and propagated by humans themselves. Cultural Anthropology: for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology. Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills. It provides in depth studies of and comparisons between living cultures and traditions. It also studies the social organization of people by studying and analyzing the language, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption an exchange, gender relations, kinship and family structure, individuals and their relationship with the past. Different subfields under this category include

Historical Figure Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Historical Figure - Essay Example As a function of understanding these contributions, this brief paper will seek to categorize and elaborate on but a few of the contributions to the field of nursing that Florence Nightingale has affected. After her rise to notoriety and prominence during the Crimean War, Nightingale used her newfound fame and influence not for selfish purposes or to enrich her own life. Rather, she established St Thomas’ Hospital of professional nursing in London. As a function of this, she ultimately laid the framework for the way in which modern nursing education would be administered and provided within an entirely new system. Although a great deal has changed since the establishment of St Thomas’ Hospital, the basic tenets of the nursing profession as lain out by Nightingale have remained almost entirely unchanged. Nightingale was also someone who was far ahead of her own time with regards to the understanding of the way that society and social consciousness, class, race, and gender ultimately affected the way in which individuals integrated with understandings of their own health and ways in which to better it (Stanley et al 2012). At a time in which common Victorian understandings of class, gender, and race frowned upon dealing with any group differently than established norms would dictate, Nightingale went out of her way to create and distribute key health information, pamphlets, give lectures to the disenfranchised populations that she saw within her midst. Whereas the understanding of the different ways in which the healthcare practitioner should be mindful of the unique and peculiar needs that different ages, education levels, classes, races, and ethnicities might require has been something that has only come to a degree of prominence within the medical community within the past 30-40 years, Nightingale predated this by nearly an entire century. As such, classifying her as a powerful visionary who was socially motivated to not only administer to the phy sical needs of her patients but also take part in socially conscious work that needed to be done cannot be understated. A further contribution that Nightingale has given to the field of nursing is her background in statistics and mathematical analysis. Her father, himself a very progressive man of the times, insisted that his daughter should be a well rounded and fully educated young woman. As a function of this, Florence Nightingale took a particular interest with relation to the study of mathematics and statistics. This fascination and interest carried over into her desire to benefit humanity. In such a way, Nightingale was among the first people to actively integrate statistics, graphs, bar charts and a range of other mathematical implementations into the field of nursing. Whereas these had been used in medicine since the time of the early Greeks, they had not carried over into nursing; an oversight which Nightingale saw certain to correct (Schiller 2011). One would have a very h ard time indeed imagining a world of current nursing in which careful documentation and statistical analysis of patient progress, condition, and pharmaceutical intakes were not recorded and analyzed. As such, one can see that the contributions that Nightingale made in