Throughout this course, we have learned how culture is a powerful tool that allows humans to adapt to their own unique environments. To better understand cultural diversity, comparisons between cultures are often used to explain the similarities and differences across societies. To demonstrate your understanding of the adaptive nature of culture, you will prepare a research paper that requires you to think about what people are doing, why they are doing what they do, and how these behaviors tie in with their environment.
In this paper, you will be comparing and contrasting one of the following topics in two cultures (other than your own), providing an analysis of the similarities and differences, and explaining why these differences might exist.
In your Partial Rough Draft, you selected a topic from the following list:
Child rearing practices
Healthcare practices
The use of music or dance as a form of political protest, or as a reflection of cultural issues, values and beliefs
Rites of passage
Conflict resolution
Marriage practices
Alternative gender roles
An alternate topic that was approved by the instructor
For this assignment, you will expand your rough draft into a five- to seven-page research paper (excluding the title and reference pages) that contains the following components:
A discussion of how two cultures (other than your own) approach the topic, including specific ethnographic examples. Be sure to choose two specific and contemporary (currently existing) cultures. Terms such as European, Asian, or African refer to continents, not cultures, and are not appropriate for this paper. Describe the culture briefly, including elements such as location, language, kinship, or other relevant information. This helps the reader understand the cultural context of your topic.
A compare and contrast analysis how the two cultures approach the topic from a culturally relativistic perspective.
A discussion on the cultural context of the topic and how it relates to symbolic systems such as religion, communication, or ritual. Here, you can use what you described in section A and discuss how it relates to your topic as it is found in the two cultures, which you discussed in section B.