College Anthropology Tutoring

Cultural Anthropology Tutoring

Common Topics in Cultural Anthropology:

Society, culture, cultural relativism, biases, food, age, gender, ethnicity, colonialism, religion, globalization, kinship, family, power, war, and many more. 

Cultural anthropology studies how groups of people think and act within specific social contexts. 

Here are some tips from our expert Anthropology tutors:

Key to succeeding in your cultural anthropology courses is to understand the idea of cultural relativism: refraining from judging a culture through the lens of your own. Initially, students can misinterpret cultural relativism as requiring them to forget their cultural backgrounds. Don’t make this mistake! Instead, embrace your own culture and actively seek parallels between what you cover in class and your experiences. This will help you grasp new concepts much more easily and deeply. It will also bring your cultural biases to light, another fundamental idea of cultural anthropology, and give you unique ideas to bring up during class discussion or in a written reflection.

Archaeology Tutoring

Common Topics in Archaeology:

Human origins, civilizations, cultural landscapes, colonization, material culture, sites, artifacts, biofacts, climate change, industrialization, and many more.

Biological Anthropology Tutoring

Common Topics in Biological Anthropology:

Human nature, human origins, evolution, biosocial variation, and embodiment

Linguistic Anthropology Tutoring 

Common Topics in Linguistic Anthropology:

Society, culture, language, identity, power, perception, and language acquisition.

Here are some tips from our expert Anthropology tutors:

Linguistic anthropology studies how language, culture, and society interact and shape one another. While its topics and theories often overlap with others in the field of linguistics, linguistic anthropology is characterized by the use of ethnographic methods. Through observation and interviews, linguistic anthropologists try to understand how groups and individuals use language in everyday life. 

Medical Anthropology Tutoring 

Common Topics in Medical Anthropology:

Global health, local health systems, illness, health disparities, western medicine, indigenous medicine, alternative medicine, ways of knowing, and embodiment.

Here are some tips from our expert Anthropology tutors:

Medical anthropology studies how different cultures understand and experience health and illness. The way most people think about health and illness in the United States is science-based. In medical anthropology, this approach is called “Western biomedicine” and is considered a cultural tradition of its own that professors and TAs will ask you to look at critically. You will learn to view the scientific method as a “way of knowing” (instead of a way of discovering facts) and to reflect on how other ways of knowing (for example, faith) might change a group’s understanding of what it means to be healthy, seek treatment, or experience pain. 

Anthropological Theory Tutoring

Common Topics in Anthropological Theory:

Structuralism, social evolutionism, Marxist anthropology, diffusionism, and feminist anthropology.

Here are some tips from our expert Anthropology tutors:

Anthropological theory can get very abstract, so it is helpful to approach a new theory with questions to help you categorize and compare/contrast with other theories. Here are 4 questions to consider: 

1. How is this theory/author defining the basic concepts of anthropology, such as society, culture, power, human, etc? 

2. Is the theory/author influenced by another theory/author? 
   

3. What is this theory/author assuming? 
   

4. What is this theory/author criticizing? 

Research methods Tutoring:

Common Topics in Anthropological research methods:

Participant observation, interviews, focus groups, textual analysis, ethnography, and many more.

Here are some tips from our expert Anthropology tutors:

If you’re taking a research methods course, you’re an anthropology major or minor. Just as with anthropological theory, reading and conducting research in anthropology is often easier when you start with a set of questions. A good place to begin is by examining the researcher’s identity (or your own, if you’re the one doing the research) and what limitations or advantages it might pose for the study.