The LinguaLinks Anthropology bookshelf focuses on providing essential help to field workers for living and working in cross-cultural situations.
Cultural awareness is a theme in every one of the LinguaLinks Library bookshelves because it is so fundamental to the process of working with minority and endangered languages. Anthropology is not intended to be a separate compartment in a field worker's mental filing cabinet or an item on a checklist, but a discipline for thinking, observing, and relating throughout the course of a language project.
Language workers who understand the culture of the minority language group they are working with will better be able to serve the group. They will be able quickly to find their appropriate roles in the local community, and to relate to the community in ways that are meaningful to them. If culture learning is done well, it will enhance the outcome of the whole project.
The LinguaLinks Anthropology bookshelf provides resources to the field workers that enable them to gather, process, interpret, and apply sociocultural data to their work with the community.
A major tool for this is the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), licensed to the Summer Institute of Linguistics for use in LinguaLinks by the Human Relations Area Files, Incorporated. This is a standard system of classifying cultural data which is used by many anthropologists, universities, museums, and other research organizations.
This system will help you organize and cross-reference data about a culture. The LinguaLinks Anthropology bookshelf contains the entire text of the Outline of Cultural Materials. This outline is also incorporated into the LinguaLinks Linguistics Lexicon workshop, where it can be used to index dictionary entries for cultural categories.
The LinguaLinks Anthropology bookshelf also includes the entire contents of Cultural Anthropology, an introductory anthropology textbook written by Paul G. Hiebert, for the general North American college and university audience. It is included in the Anthropology bookshelf so you'll be able to apply the basic cultural concepts, vocabulary, research ideas, and case studies to your own situations.
Another useful resource is Notes on Anthropology and Intercultural Community Work (NOA), a quarterly publication of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. It is a source of information, ideas, research results, and book reviews on a wide variety of cultural topics and areas of the world.
All this, plus more, is available in the LinguaLinks Anthropology bookshelf of LinguaLinks. To see a list of other resources available in this bookshelf go to the Contents of the Anthropology bookshelf.
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