Humanities Homework Help

you will use anthropological methods to examine a cultural situation from three different perspectives before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then you will propose and/or predict how human behavior will change because of this disease. Your presentation can also be in a digital presentation format of your choosing (e.g., report, poster presentation, photo journal, video, podcast, website, blog, game, video, etc).  See the grading rubric below to see what you need to include in your presentation. You will post your presentation in a discussion to share with your peers.  While you are not required to post a peer response, I encourage you to view some of your peers’ projects — you might learn something new!

In this project, we are not tethered to “going into the field” because many of us don’t have time, and our circumstances are preventing us from leaving home — so we have to get creative.  For this fieldwork project, you  might decide to just do observations from a distance — outside recording what you see, online — observing people’s reactions, interpreting a dataset, attending a virtual religious event or museum tour, or watching the market. Or you might get creative and observe your family using video or recordings or photographs.  In all cases, you will need to be observant, record your findings, and report your results.  Listen to the following podcast to get a little background on where we might go with this project.  

Listen: The Next Year (or Two) of the Pandemic (27 min.) (Links to an external site.)

Background

Throughout the course, you will learn how humans use culture to adapt to our environment. In fact, some would argue that one of the reasons humans are so successful from an evolutionary standpoint is that they have an uncanny ability to adapt to rapidly changing environments. We have an opportunity to examine culture change up close with the onset of the 2019-20 Coronavirus Pandemic, which has, is, and will continue to force humans to change their behavior in order to survive this worldwide environmental stress.

2019-20 Coronavirus Pandemic

The 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic is a pandemic of coronavirus disease COVID-19, which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease was first identified in November of 2019  in Wuhan, Hubei, China.  As of today, it has had a global impact killing hundreds of thousands and wreaking havoc on people’s lives. 

Fieldwork Project Expectations

Read through the following grading rubric, which is really an outline of your final project.  You will have an opportunity to submit your topic and method ideas in an early discussion to get my and your classmates’ feedback.  After that discussion, if you still have questions, please feel free to ask me!

Criteria

Possible Points

     I.         Topic Selection

1. Presentation focuses on a component of culture like language, art, music, technology, education, economics, subsistence (how people make a living), economics, power and politics, gender, race relations, ethnicity, religion, globalization, families and/or marriage. 
2. Presentation focuses on a specific topic within one of these components 

10

     II.         Introduction

10

1. What is the purpose of your project?
2. Explain the significance of this experiment for students of cultural anthropology.
3. State the problem/question – The background information needs to lead into a question such as “How will [topic] change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?”

   II.         Background Research – Barriers to Change

1. Identify the cultural barriers to change in relation to your topic (Chapter 13 download, page 295)
2. Identify any social and psychological barriers to change in relation to your topic (Chapter 13 download, see page 297)
3. Identify any stimulants for change in relation to your topic (Chapter 13 download, page 297)

Feel free to also include some background research on your topic.  To earn full credit in this section, you will need to show how the barriers and stimulants to culture change relate to your research topic.

20

  III.         Methods

20

1. Describe the anthropological methods you used to examine this topic from three different perspectives. 
2. Be sure to describe exactly how you conducted your research, so someone who would like to duplicate your research methods could do so based on the instructions that you provide. Think of it as recipe instructions. [Note: This is NOT a “research paper,” or informative essay, where you research a specific topic and present what you learned.  This is an active research project where you collect and analyze a dataset using anthropological methods to present your results. ]
3. Include any observation techniques (sitting and watching, video taping, recording, interview questionnaire, etc.), and if appropriate describe the software, social media, data sources, websites, etc.
4. Be sure to include methods on you learned about this topic from before and during the pandemic. If you do an interview or post to a social media site, you might ask what was it like before, what is it like now, what do you think it will be like in the near and distant future.

 IV.         Results

20

1. Before Pandemic – Describe any patterns in the behavior before the pandemic from three different perspectives.  You will probably have to do some background research to gain this perspective and/or use evidence from your data collection methods
2. During Pandemic – Describe any patterns in the behavior during the pandemic from three different perspectives.  Be sure to use evidence from your data collection methods.
3. After Pandemic – Propose or predict how you think this behavior will change or will have to change in order for humans to persist from three different perspectives.

   V.         Conclusion

10

1. First, restate the original problem and/or question.
2. Second, briefly summarize the results.
3. Third, briefly discuss how this topic might affect culture change
4. Provide an explanation for the results by referring back to the evolutionary significance of the need for human culture to adapt in order to survive this pandemic