IB Diploma Programme Social and Cultural Anthropology SL (first assessment 2019; 2017 guide). This topic equips ENGAGING WITH ANTHROPOLOGY, examined in Paper 1 (40% at SL): the language of the discipline (the nine key concepts), the practice (participant observation and its research tradition), and anthropological thinking (reflexivity and the making of cultural assumptions explicit). The unseen-text paper asks the course's big questions. This handout teaches the concept kit, the comparative gaze and reflexivity. All worked examples are original classroom vignettes, not ethnographic publications.

Must-know for engaging with anthropology:

The discipline thinks through nine key concepts 核心概念: belief and knowledge, change, culture 文化, identity, materiality, power 权力, social relations, society and symbolism 象征. A concept is a lens, not a label: naming power in a greeting explains who bows to whom; naming symbolism explains why the same bow can mean respect in one corridor and mockery in another. Arguments in papers run concept PLUS evidence, never concept alone.

Worked vignette. The lunch queue, read through three lenses: culture (first-come-first-served as a learned, not natural, rule), power (the queue-jumper tolerated when older, punished when younger), symbolism (the tray as the individual-portion marker).

Anthropology is distinct among the social sciences in its research tradition of participant observation 参与观察: living the social group's life while watching it, long enough for the strange to become legible and the familiar to become strange. Comparison is the discipline's engine: ethnography 民族志 (the written account of a social group) is read against other ethnographies so that cultural assumptions 文化预设 become explicit: the queue only looks natural until one has queued elsewhere.

Worked vignette, continued. A student who has eaten in a communal-sharing school reads the individual-tray queue as cold; a student raised on queues reads the shared table as chaotic: both are describing the same room with different assumptions, and anthropology is the discipline that says so out loud.

Turning the lens on the observer is reflexivity 反身性: the anthropologist's age, role and expectation shape what the field shows (the teacher watching the corridor sees rule-breaking; the new student sees navigation). Paper 1's unseen text carries the course's big questions 大问题 (how are we the same as and different from each other; how does the local connect to the global): the answer connects the passage's detail, a named concept and ethnographic material.

Worked vignette, concluded. Asked the sameness-and-difference question on a queueing passage, the answer runs: same (all groups order access to scarce things), different (the rule learned, the queue's meaning, who may bend it), evidenced from the vignette plus one read ethnography.

• The nine concepts as lenses, each argued with evidence (concepts).

• Participant observation as the discipline's distinct method (method).

• The observer positioned; assumptions made explicit (reflexivity).

• Ethnography read comparatively, not alone (comparison).

• The worked queue vignette and its three lenses understood (worked). Boundary notes: the examiner must see the discipline: concepts named, ethnographic evidence grounded, the observer positioned. All worked examples are original classroom vignettes, not ethnographic publications.