Anthropology and Contemporary World Problems Quiz #1

What is Anthropology?

The study of human diversity, past and present, and the application of that knowledge to help people of different backgrounds better understand one another

Origins of Anthropology

Context: 18th and 19th century Europe

- Breakthroughs in technology, transport and communication

- Led to economic and colonial expansion with people worldwide

• Motives

- Colonial governance

- Curiosity

Motives

- Colonial governance

- Curiosity

Anthropology is …

- Global in scope

• Understanding the local everyday lives of people

• Cross-cultural and comparative

• Holistic

• Empirical

Global in scope

• Covers the whole world

• Not constrained by geographical boundaries

Cross-cultural and Comparative

Anthropologists compare practices across cultures to explore human similarities, differences, and the potential for human cultural expression

Focus on variation

• across time and place

• especially cross-cultural comparison

• to understand the spectrum of human diversities and possibilities on a global scale

Holistic

Understanding parts within a whole

Empirical

• Answers questions based on observable data and evidence gathered through direct observation and research in the field

• Focus on what people do, how do they live, what the effects are

What are the 4 sub-fields of anthropology?

Biological, Archaeology, Linguistic, Cultural

Biological Anthropology

• Study of humans from a biological perspective

• Focus on how human species has evolved over time and adapted to diverse environments

• Fossil and genetic evidence

Archaeology

• Investigation of the human past by excavating and analyzing material remains (artifacts)

• Prehistoric Archaeology

- Seeks to reconstruct human behavior in the distant past (before recorded history) through the examination of artifacts

• Historic Archaeology

- The exploration of the more recent past through the examination of physical remains, artifacts and written or oral records

Linguistic Anthropology

• Study of human language in the past and present

• Studies how people use language in social and cultural contexts (the relationships between language, social difference and power)

• Describes and analyzes languages

• Studies how language changes over time within a culture

• Studies how languages travel across cultures

Cultural Anthropology

• Study of contemporary people and their communities

• Focus on everyday life

• Ask questions about:

▪ What people do

▪ How people make and embed meanings in their practice

▪ How human communities distribute/practice power

▪ How this constraints and enables human activities

What is ethnographic fieldwork and its methods?

• Find a field site

• Participant Observation

A key anthropological research method involving both participation in and observation of the daily life of the people being studied

• Ask inductive questions

Starts with gathering detailed observations and experiences within a community without a pre-defined hypothesis, and then uses those observations to develop broader theories or patterns about human behavior

Building an understanding from the “ground up” through open-ended questions

• Do interviews, surveys, map out areas

• Analyze inductively

• Write up “ethnography”

Looks beyond specific local realities to see more general patterns of human behavior

To explore how local experiences intersect with global dynamics

Significance of Intensive Fieldwork?

• To look beyond the taken-for-granted

Making something that is unfamiliar familiar

Taking something that is familiar and making it seem strange

• To discover the complex systems of power and meaning that people construct

What is culture and its characteristics?

A system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts and institutions that are created, learned, shared and contested by a group of people

Our guide for understanding and interacting with people and the world around us

What are the aspects of culture?

• Shared norms

• Values

• Symbols

• Mental Maps of Reality

• Material Objects

• Structures of Power

Media

Education

Religion

Politics

What is a cultural group and examples?

• Can be large or small

• Can have within it significant diversity

• May not be accepted by everyone

Each person belongs to several cultural groups

• National

• Religion

• Ethnic Groups

• Generation

• Social Class

• Workplace (Corporate Culture)

Norms

• Ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or towards certain other people

What is considered “normal” or “appropriate” behavior

In particular situations

To certain kinds of people

• Many are assumed; some are formalized

• Can also be debated, challenged and changed

Especially when dominant groups use them to oppress a minority within a population

Values

• Beliefs about what is important, what makes a good life, what is true, right and beautiful

• Reflect shared standards that guide people’s behavior

• Shape the goals that people feel are important for themselves, their families, their communities

• Are not fixed

Can be enshrined into law

Can be debated, contested and changed

Symbols

• Anything (object, word, action) that represents something else

• Relationship between symbol and what it stands for is culturally defined

• Collective meaning/understandings

• Symbolic meanings vary around the world

• Change over time

• Powerful forces in the world

Categories/Mental Maps of Reality

• Cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and the assignment of meaning to those classifications

• How we make sense of what kinds of people and things exist

• Categories help classify us classify reality

• Mental maps assign meaning to what has been classified

• Often deeply implicit/ taken for granted

• Shaped through enculturation; vary around the world

• Can be challenged and redrawn

Challenges in Studying Culture?

• Recognizing particularity

• Recognizing fluidity

• Recognizing historicity

• Recognizing equality and co-evalness

What is enculturation?

The process of learning culture

• Learning knowledge and practices from people and organizations around us

• Can be formal (school, religious education, dance classes etc.)

• Can be informal (family, friends, media etc.)

• All humans are capable of learning the cultural forms they are exposed to

Cultural forms can be passed down and persist over time

Cultural traditions often change over time/space

Culture is Shared Yet Contested

• The result of shared experience developed as a result of living in human social worlds

• Enculturation enables humans to communicate, establish patterns of behavior and live in communities

• Constantly contested and changing

• Culture is what people do; not something they have

Why is culture symbolic and material?

• People through enculturation/shared social worlds develop (largely) shared body of cultural understandings and patterns of behavior

Symbolic

• shapes human meaning-making and understandings of the world

Material

• The objects and entities that make up our environment

• Culture is implicated in how we grow food, how we make things, the structures we build etc.

• Conveys cultural understandings and practices across time

Why study culture?

• Everyone is shaped by their cultural background

• Starts with curiosity, self-awareness, humility and desire to broaden our worldview

• Learn to recognize our own cultural biases, norms, values, symbolic systems

• Begin to understand how these cultural understandings show up in our reactions to learning about unfamiliar cultural practices etc.

• To see our own culture as one expression within the context of global cultural diversity

How to develop am anthropological mindset?

• Avoiding Ethnocentrism

• Cultural Relativism

• Reflexivity

• Positionality

• Denaturalization

Ethnocentrism

• The belief that one’s own culture or way of life is normal, natural, or even superior

• Judging other cultures only in terms of your own.

• Something anthropologists strive to recognize and avoid.

• Example: Food. Using different parts of the chicken. Different greetings (bows, handshakes, hugs)

Cultural Relativism

• Suspension of judgement

• To understand a people’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context

• First task is to understand people’s logic, meanings and practices within their cultural context

Reflexivity

• Examination of one’s own beliefs, judgements and practices

• Analyzing how these cultural understandings may impact our analyses of the world

• Culture-less objectivity is not possible

Positionality

• Differences in social position and power shape identities, access, and knowledge

• Account for how these positions/identities might shape research/learning process

Denaturalization

• Realizing that something is not natural or pre-ordained

• Often the result of cultural and historical comparison

• Examples:

Sleep. “Natural” sleep in the US of sleeping 8 hours/day vs. segmented sleep

Childbirth. “Natural” to give birth on back with doctors vs. upright positions with midwives

Why is power important in its relationship with culture?

• Key to analyzing dynamics of cultural appropriation.

The Relationship between Power and Culture: Cultural Appropriation

• The unwanted taking of cultural practices or knowledge from one group by another more dominant group

• A more powerful group takes aspects of a subordinate group’s culture for personal or corporate gain

• Uses taken elements in ways considered offensive to source community

• Taking group improves its status and power while creating negative consequences for group of origin

• Leads to stereotypes, stripping of heritage, grief, loss and violation

Ex. costumes, fashion

The Relationship between Power and Culture: Diffusion

• Movement of cultural forms, practices, values and technologies from one setting to another

• Between relatively equal status groups

• Movement often prompted innovations and changes in receiving group’s cultural practices

The Relationship between Power and Culture: Acculturation

• Mutual influencing of two unequal groups that have come into continuous first-hand contact. Process of adaptation and change.

Ex. Pizza (Italian immigrants changing and adapting their recipes for an American audience)

The Relationship between Power and Culture: Assimilation

• A powerful group’s imposition of cultural practices upon an economically, politically, or demographically weaker target group.

Ex. Indigenous populations needing to adapt and change in order to not die

What is Social Constructionism and its significance?

• A theory of knowledge that many aspects of our perceived reality are not inherent or fixed but are actively defined created and defined through social interactions, cultural norms and shared meanings within a society.

• Applies to “everyday” as well as “specialist” knowledge like scientific knowledge

Significance

• Argues that the self is formed through:

- Our interactions with others

- In relationship to social, cultural and political contexts

Vs.

- Assumed objective biological facts

What is Social Constructionism NOT?

Essentialism is the idea that:

- Knowledge is universal, transhistorical and not dependent on context

- People or things have inherent and unchanging characteristics that define them

Naturalism is the idea that:

- Knowledge is “out there” to be found in nature, does not depend on social interaction

What is the relationship between Social Constructionism and Culture and examples?

• Social construction: knowledge created and maintained through social interaction

Includes mental maps we use to understand the world

These are basic features of human culture

• Social construction passed through enculturation

Ex. Gender reveal parties (blue for boys and pink for girls) & how these colors used to represent the opposite

Systems of knowledge and power in social constructionism and examples?

• Social constructionist analyses challenge the categorical underpinnings of inequalities by revealing their production and reproduction through unequal systems of knowledge and power

Ex. Why are white woman associated with the caring of the house and reproducing children?

What are power dynamics in social constructionism and examples?

• Social constructs can be used to reinforce power imbalances within a society, as certain groups may be privileged or marginalized based on their assigned social categories

Ex. AIDS/HIV being associated with gay men even though it affects everyone, and this association caused a delay in treatments being found to treat it

What is social construction analysis and how is it practiced?

• Identify social constructions

- Compare across time and place

• How do people and groups participate in the construction of their perceived reality?

• What are the effects/consequences of this social construction?

Practicing Social Constructionist Analysis

• Social constructionist analyses examine categories of difference as fluid, dynamic and changing according to historical and geographical context

• A social constructionist perspective approaches existing inequalities are neither inevitable nor immutable

What are examples of products of human definition and interpretations shaped by cultural and historical contexts? What are some case studies?

• Race (Black, white etc.)

• Gender (Men, women, etc.)

• Class

• Sexuality

• Ability

• Socially/ Culturally constructed identities developed over time in relation to historical, social and political contexts

• Socially/Culturally constructed identities that affect our communication and our

relationships

Case Study 1: Immigrant Groups and Race Classification

• Irish: Black or white?

• Italians: Black or white?

Case Study 2: Medical diagnoses

• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD): Only officially recognized in 2013 with the publication of

the DSM-5.

• Hysteria: An old term used for women with supposedly neurological symptoms that did not fit

the gender expectations of their time.

• How societal changes influenced public perception and treatment options so that it evolved

from being a stigmatized condition to a diagnosis.