Your final grade will be based on three in-class exams and a paper. Carolyn Brown Heinz. Asian Cultural Traditions, Waveland Press, 1999. China s Urban Villagers. 2nd edition, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1991.
Culture is humankind s adaptive dimension.
Thus cultural differences and similarities are determined by the kinds of adaptations groups of people make to their physical, human, and supernatural environment. Cultural differences, therefore, can be based on the differences in the environments people are adapting to. However, even similar or the same environment can be perceived differently by different peoples. These perceptions may be based on technology. For example, the Indians of the Great Plains perceived an environment teeming with buffalo and their subsistence was based on hunting the buffalo.