How does a society's relationship to the natural environment influence Term Paper

How does a society's relationship to the natural environment influence the cultural beliefs and practices of its people - Term Paper Example 1). Anthropology came from the Greek word arthropos which means human and logos which mean study of. The discipline of anthropology is about the human behavior with the combination of humanistic, scientific, historical, psychological, social and biological views (Jurmain, Kilgore and Trevathan, 2009, p. 6). According to Angrosino (2002), two fields of anthropology currently exist: physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. Human population is studied by physical anthropology through their genes and mechanics of evolution. The fossils and the living creatures are compared to come up with conclusions. On the other hand, cultural anthropology is concerned with the human societies and its impacts in the daily lives of the people. Cultural anthropology has five subdivisions: archaeology, ethnography, ethnology, social anthropology, and linguistics. Archaeology deals with the culture through studies using the remains or materials (artifacts) while ethnography describes the society sy stematically and vividly usually through field work. Ethnology deals with the interpretations of the information from ethnology while social anthropology is concerned with the social structure and groups. ... Various views may help the readers to understand the importance of knowing how the ways of life of people is affected by their surroundings. DISCUSSION Environment greatly affects the culture of people like the concept of racism. The variation within the human race is not caused by biological changes but more of cultural concepts like difference in access to social and economic resources (Goodman, 2006, p. 161). It can be said that the differences is manmade because biological variation is nonconcordance according to Goodman (2006). It is inherited separately or independently. Also in the biological perspective, genes are not the only means where the effect of nature can be seen or measured. Physical body is also checked to prove the differences among races and researchers also tried to prove that racism is a biological effect. Craniometry was done by experts to compare the intelligence of the human ancestors. It was even use in the society to rank criminals and people from different races because the traditional belief of intelligence is affected by the size of the brain (Lansing and de Vet, 2006, p. 4). Many myths have been held by people regarding the concept of racism as biology, but no matter what they do, the commonly-held beliefs are still beliefs and myths, not a reality. First of all, race is not based upon fixed, ideal and unchanging concepts contrary to the popular belief which was favored by the popular culture but not science (Goodman, 2006, p. 163). A good example is the traditional concept of beauty which turns against the black. The fad favors the European-looking people to be beautiful (Mercer, 1990, p. 247). The same can be seen in the chapter of a book written by Richard Rodriguez. According to Rodriguez (1990, p. 277-278), his