Humanities: Expert Guides and Resources

Have you ever felt you needed to hone your critical thinking skills, to enable you to master the logic of arguments and improve your critical skills as you read, write, speak, or listen? This Cheat Sheet is here to help. © LinkedIn Sales Solutions / Unsplash.comThe ingredients of a good critical thinkerA good critical thinker is composed of many ingredients.

The acronym BIPOC has come into common use recently; it stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The term became widely adopted amid the discussions sparked by the death of George Floyd in 2020, as people confronted the reality that different groups have different experiences. © Dmitry Demidovich / Shutterstock.

If you don’t understand your society, you can’t truly understand yourself. That's one reason it's worthwhile to study sociology.You are part of your society, and your actions and beliefs are part of what defines that society. Your actions, in a thousand small ways, help shape your society, and your beliefs both influence and are influenced by your society’s norms and values.

What is anthropology? The study of humanity, or anthropology, starts with the origin and evolution of humanity. Other elements key to the study of anthropology are human modernity (anatomical and behavioral); defining culture and cultural universals; how humans feed themselves (subsistence) and the influence of subsistence on social organization; and human language.

Sociology is the study of society — of people interacting in groups, from small social circles to global society. Sociologists gather information about the social world and systematically analyze that information to understand social phenomena including class, race, gender, culture, social networks, and historical change.

Anthropologists don't just study the evolution of human beings; they also learn about their cultures, how cultures develop, and how cultures shape human behavior. If you need to refresh your memory about culture, like what it is and how it guides human behavior, take a look at these aspects: Culture is a learned set of ideas and rules about appropriate behavior shared by a group; it's passed on from one generation to the next not by the genes but with language.

Many people are absolutely convinced of the truth of some things about society that are not entirely true. Here are a few of the most common misconceptions about society, proven false by sociology. Social inequality is deserved. Although it’s true that people with many resources in society (saved wealth, good jobs, happy families) have worked hard to earn those resources, it’s not necessarily true that people who lack such resources are lacking them because it’s somehow their fault.

By studying early hominids (large, bipedal primates) that date back to millions of years, anthropologists can track the development of the human race. When exploring anthropology, keep these important points in mind: The evolutionary process shapes species by replication, variation, and selection, leading to adaptation.