Discuss the contribution of material culture Essay Example for Free

Discuss the contribution of material culture Essay The aim of this essay is to explore how useful material culture studies is to understanding societies which existed under Roman rule, especially those of Gaul and Britain. These provinces of Rome adopted Roman culture and used Roman objects for their own use, which could come under the heading of cultural bricolage, where new cultural items are obtained by attributing new functions to previously existing ones, however I shall address this later on in the essay. Woolf comments that anthropologists and archaeologists use the concept of culture as a way of making sense of the diversity of human societies that cannot be expressed simply in terms of biological variation. It is seen by many to be a more precise way of understanding societies rather than seeing how advanced or rich a society was.1 Studying and understanding social identity can also be seen as an excellent alternative to relying on narratives written by Roman authors who were biased and wrote from a Romano-centric position, and it also allows us to consider other elements, for instance class,status, gender, age, occupation, and religion. Material culture can be defined as the study through artifacts (and other pertinent historical evidence) of belief systemsthe values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptionsof a particular community or society, usually across time. As a study, it is based upon the obvious premise that the existence of a man-made object is concrete evidence of the presence of a human mind operating at the time of fabrication. The common assumption underlying material culture research is that objects made or modified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect the belief patters of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and, by extension, the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part. 2 Concerning Roman culture, Woolf defines it as the range of objects, beliefs and practices that were characteristic of people who considered themselves to be, and were widely acknowledged as, Roman. It is believed that every man-made object required the operation of some thought and design. Therefore it is the assumption of material culture studies that this thought is a reflection of the culture that produced the man-made objects. With this theory we can see, in some way, how a culture, which had no written records of its existence, lived. One advantage of material culture studies is that it is beneficial to social historians who wish to know about an entire group and not just the elites of a particular society. A useful definition of the term archaeology is that it uses fieldwork and excavation, and the comparative study of sites and objects to compile information about the pastwhich can illuminate aspects of Roman life which were never recorded. However it does have its limitations as it cannot achieve certainty as all known sites and artefacts are merely a surviving sample of what once existed- and not necessarily a representative sample.4 So in understanding identity we may be able to place these artefacts in context as we will know what particular objects are used for certain practices, for instance burial customs or forms of pottery produced.5 Jones defines cultural identity as that aspect of a persons self-conceptualization which results from identification with a broader group in opposition to others on the basis of perceived cultural differentiation and/or common descent..6 Concerning material culture, Pitts chose 12 areas of study, these were: architecture, art, epigraphy (inscriptions in stone), faunal remains(animal bones), floral remains, funerary evidence, literature, monumentality, pottery, settlement (morphology and landscape archaeology) and small finds(portable material culture other than pottery).7 Epigraphic inscriptions allows us to observe how literacy spread through Gaul and Britain, along with helping us to trace an outline of the cultural geography of Roman Gaul8 Woolf also comments that inscriptions are useful as they represent a wide range of Roman cultural customs which included political, cultic, and funerary practices. He adds to this by suggesting that inscriptions should be seen as attempts made by people to assert their identities and to show their achievements in terms of status. Art and architecture are important as it gives us some insight into cultural ideologies, however this type of evidence only really survived if it was owned by the elites of the society, and the art and mosaics were only limited to this class, so it has its biases. Although it does have its uses as we can see how the adoption of villa architecture by the British and Gaulish tribes shows the acceptance and spread of Roman culture throughout the conquered countries.

NAACP Essay -- essays research papers

NAACP The civil rights movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. It has been made up of many movements, though it is often used to refer to the struggles between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African-Americans and to end racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South. It focuses on that particular struggle, rather than the comparable movements to end discrimination against other ethnic groups within the United States or those struggles, such as the women's liberation, gay liberation, and disabled rights movements, that have used similar tactics in pursuit of similar goals. The civil rights movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, both in its tactics and in increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights. One of the most important organizations of this era was the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). NAACP is an or ganization composed mainly of American blacks, but with many white members, whose goal is the end of racial discrimination and segregation. The association was formed as the direct result of the lynching (1908) of two blacks in Springfield, Ill. The incident produced a wide response by white Northerners to a call by Mary W. Ovington, a white woman, for a conference to discuss ways of achieving political and social equality for blacks. This conference led to the formation (1910) of the NAACP, headed by eight prominent Americans, seven white and one, William E. B. Du Bois, black (wikipedia 1). The selection of Du Bois was significant, for he was a black who had rejected the policy of gradualism advocated by Booker T. Washington and demanded immediate equality for blacks. From 1910 to 1934 Du Bois was the editor of the association's periodical The Crisis, which reported on race relations around the world. The new organization grew so rapidly that by 1915 it was able to organize a partially successful boycott of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed blacks of the Reconstruction era in a distorted light( S partacus 2). Most of the NAACP's early efforts were directed against lynching. In this area it could claim considerable success. In 1911 there were 71 lynchings in the United States, with a black person the victim 63 times; by the 1950s lynching had virtua... ...erica's darker citizens were denied. From the ballot box to the classroom, the dedicated workers, organizers, and leaders who forged this great organization and maintain its status as a champion of social justice, fought long and hard to ensure that the voices of African Americans would be heard. The legacy of those pioneers such as W.E.B DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkens and the hundreds of thousands of nameless faces who worked tirelessly cannot and must not be forgotten (NAACP 1). The history of the NAACP is one of blood sweat and tears. From bold investigations of mob brutality, protests of mass murders, segregation and discrimination, to testimony before congressional committees on the vicious tactics used to bar African Americans from the ballot box, it was the talent and tenacity of NAACP members that saved lives and changed many negative aspects of American society. While much of its history is chronicled in books, articles, pamphlets and magazines, the true movement lies in the faces---black, white, yellow, red, and brown---united to awaken the conscientiousness of people, and a nation. Work Cited www.en.wikipedia.org www.naacp.org www.spartacus.schoolnet.co

Consumer Behavior Tv Advertising

Television advertisements are paid for by an organization (usually a business) to convey a message and to market or promote a specific product or service. These advertisements can range in length from a few seconds to several minutes and have been used since 1941. These advertisements usually get the prospected consumers' attention and often times persuade them to urchasing the product or service.This type of advertisement is in the form of entertainment and needs to be creative. Humor is one of the most widely used techniques in advertising around the world, with about one out of every five television ads containing humorous appeals, but do they actually get us to laugh or smile. Despite the wide array of contemporary advertising formats and media, television advertising remains the most dominant form to which typical consumers are exposed.Research on attitudes toward advertising in general (Att-AiG) implicitly assumes that the Att-AiG measure represents advertising as a whole. A ma jor finding of the current research is that consumers tend to have a mental representation, or exemplar, of the most typical type of advertising†television advertising†when they televtston advertising. To test for typicality effects on reported Att-AiG, we conducted an experiment to test that Att-AiG is closely related to attitudes toward television advertising (Att- TV, ereafter), because television advertising is activated when participants report their Att-AiG.he experiment was a one-factor-between-group design with seven groups: one control group and six experimental groups. A total of 134 undergraduate students from the same population as Study 1 participated in the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the seven conditions. Gender was balanced. Advertising and marketing students were not included in the experiment.. Each of the 33 items was tested across the 7 conditions via ANOVA and post hoc ests.

Tiananmen Square Massacre Photos from 1989