I have a short paper to write for an intro to anthro class. He is being intentionally vague about what he wants. Basically something to do with my intended field of study (psych) and how it relates to anthropology.

I mentioned evolutionary psychology and he said I could do something like how, for instance, studies show a general preference when it comes to a woman's physique (10:7 hip waist ratio, etc) and compare it to cultural differences.

Recently I took up some interest in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, how language can determine thought... But upon further investigation, there is very little research about this topic and it is inherently tricky it seems. Leaning back towards writing about evolutionary psychology, but I don't necessarily want to write about attraction.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, I don't need any help other than selecting a topic. We will be required to use 5 scholarly, peer reviewed sources.

google "sprachliche relativitaet" and have a look at chomsky's writings on linguistics

Before I do so, from a small synopsis of the development of linguistic relativism, I was under the impression chomsky argues against language determining thought. Is this correct?

edit: here is what I read

Lenneberg was also one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the Universalist theory of language which was finally formulated by Noam Chomsky in the form of Universal Grammar, effectively arguing that all languages share the same underlying structure. The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages – the knowledge acquired by learning a language – are merely surface phenomena and do not affect cognitive processes that are universal to all human beings. This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s and the notion of linguistic relativity fell out of favor and became even the object of ridicule

This post was edited by ForTheMathematics on May 7 2013 07:42pm

@

from my reading of some of chomsky's works i only remember that he touched the issue but not the particulars - was more interested in formal languages at that time

if you are still not sure what your teacher wants, check what he had as themes in the previous year(s) and there might be something which catches your interest more