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[Lagslayer]

My brother and I agree that these are the best commercials in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-1io2ADUI0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Icbg0b-2tc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yHgY-MyKMY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfBdKO19mpM

The last one is my personal favourite.

I'm not amused.

[Lectorog]

I'm writing a three-page, five-paragraph anthropological analysis of the culture-bound ritual that is a baseball game. This is a terrible thing.

[Josephus]

I take it you're not too fond of baseball.

[Lectorog]

I don't care about baseball - or any sports - at all. That's not the terrible thing, though. I'm writing a detailed analysis of the impact on culture of the baseball game to the spectators of it. Other suggestions of what to write this paper on included haircuts. These are important parts of culture, but I hope the instructor is expecting large amounts of filler BS.
My first explanatory paragraph is about how baseball is entertaining because it represents conflict.
I'd be laughing about this if I didn't think it was such a bad thing that it exists for a grade.
I'm going to look back on this entire class as a joke. The textbook is wrong about things. It says things that are wrong and we're supposed to believe it.

[Josephus]

The textbook is wrong about things. It says things that are wrong and we're supposed to believe it.

Ooh, ooh, I love wrong things! Share some for us!

Unless the errors are the kind that would require training to notice, in which case I suppose that wouldn't help at all.

[Lectorog]

Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers religious questions. Cosmology is only a religious thing.
Cultural adaptation is to humans as biological adaptation is to everything else - cultural adaptation is at the same level as evolution.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
It makes many absurd implications and relations too.
The writing style seems to be presenting a few points, mostly as terminology, and then briefly rambling about tangentially related subjects. The teaching style follows this.
There are also some pieces of information that are interesting and useful, but aren't tied into the rest of the section. For example, it talks about all of the parts of speech (what words are formed of, how words relate to each other, etc. - mostly just the terms used for these) but it never says how that affects culture, why different cultures have different styles of language, or even how language is created.

[Josephus]

Cultural adaptation is to humans as biological adaptation is to everything else - cultural adaptation is at the same level as evolution.

Oh wow. Dat social darwinism.

I suspect your textbook might be evil.

[Frumple]

Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers religious questions. Cosmology is only a religious thing.

Wait, what? No. Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers metaphysical questions, specifically about the nature of existence. Religions generally do that, too, but so does other things (like say, science!).

Is... is that what the book is saying? That cosmology is strictly a religious thing? If so the philosophers that shat out anthropology in their down time would like to have some words. E: There may be a little professional (sorta) derision there, though. Re: Cultural anthropology especially. It's got some good folks working in it and doing some fairly impressive things, but in general it's a field of study that philosophy students look down on as being too much bullshit. This is a thing that speaks volumes, heh. E2: It's more accurate to say that it's just an incredibly young field of study that's still not quite sure what it's doing or how it's going about doing it.

The rest of that definitely sounds like an introduction text type thing, though. Bleh, I say. Bleh. Those things sometimes cause more trouble than they're worth.

[Lectorog]

There are many strong implications in the book that Social Darwinism is a bad thing that hurts the world.
It also seems to favor the view that every culture is equal and no culture is more advanced than any other (cultural relativism to a bit of an extreme). It presents explanation that makes this seem logical (like that the only way a culture can be less advanced is if it was isolated and no true isolation can occur), but it's really not very logical; at least, that's what I think.
This is the book, if you're curious.

[kaenneth]

Ahh, textbook by lawyers (no offense Truean)

[Solifuge]

Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers religious questions. Cosmology is only a religious thing.
Cultural adaptation is to humans as biological adaptation is to everything else - cultural adaptation is at the same level as evolution.

Lectorg, when the textbook relates culture to evolution, that's entirely factual. Cultures grow and spread, change, intermingle, and so on. Cultural elements, from things like language and toolmaking to forms of entertainment and recreation, all follow laws akin to natural selection... but they're inherited by a different mechanism that follows communication boundaries instead of geographical or locational ones.

...if that made any sense.

Also, you'll get to the effects of language on society and even psychology in higher-level Anthropology courses. They might be glossing over things now to build a foundation for discussion.

[Josephus]

Also, you'll get to the effects of language on society and even psychology

Semiotics, yum.

[Lectorog]

Solifuge: Yes, that makes sense. The issue is that of time. Cultural adaptation can occur at a much faster rate than evolution of the compared organisms.
It effectively said at one point that biological adaptation is better than the human form, cultural adaptation, because while biological creatures will always inherit the best traits, societies have things like misinformation that can be passed down. There are four things explicitly wrong with this.

Cosmology is a system of beliefs that answers metaphysical questions, specifically about the nature of existence. Religions generally do that, too, but so does other things (like say, science!).

Is... is that what the book is saying? That cosmology is strictly a religious thing?

It's in the chapter on religion. It has two paragraphs, under the sub-heading "The Search for Order and Meaning", under the heading "Some Functions of Religion". The definition of cosmology is "a system of beliefs that deals with fundamental questions in the religious and social order." The first paragraph is mostly examples of what it could explain. The second is about how it gives meaning to believers' lives.
I made it clear on the class discussion board that cosmology is not only of religious nature, but I'm not sure how much anyone cared.

Also, you'll get to the effects of language on society and even psychology in higher-level Anthropology courses. They might be glossing over things now to build a foundation for discussion.

I have no plans to take any more courses on anthropology; I'm taking sociology and psychology as high school dual-credit courses, and then I'm finished with my social science credits. These things interest me to a degree, but there's too much BS and conflicts between my thoughts and theirs, and overall it's not worth it to me. Not as college courses, anyway.

EDIT: I want to vomit. I don't feel well. I'm taking a break from this. It's becoming difficult to write more than a few unique sentences about how baseball promotes and strengthens social relationships. This is made harder considering that I don't understand how social interaction works.

EDIT2: I think I have stress-induced paranoia. Is that a thing?

[kaijyuu]

Probably. Stress is known to turn people into gibbering messes composed entirely of despair. Paranoia doesn't sound too far off.

[SalmonGod]

Don't know how much it would conflict with your textbook, but you might look up Noam Chomsky's thoughts on the role of spectator sports in society for some inspiration.

Probably. Stress is known to turn people into gibbering messes composed entirely of despair.

This is me lately.  I don't understand how people live like this; in totalitarian environments doing drudgery, meaningless, thankless crap all day every day.  People spend their whole lives like this.  I've only done 6 years, and I can barely contain myself.  The effort required to force myself to concentrate on my work literally causes me to pass out, even if I've had 10 hours of sleep.  I spend most of time instead consumed by fantasies of random mania, like cartoonishly tearing out my own eyeballs and shoving them down my bosses throats, or doing absolutely anything to distract myself from those thoughts.