Cultural anthropology midterm

4 field anthropology

4 interrelated disciplines to study humanity: cultural, linguistic, biological, and archaeology

Anthropology

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

Cultural anthropology

The study of peoples everyday lives and their communities- their behaviors, beliefs, and institutions, including how people make meaning as they live, work, and play together.

Thinking Anthropologically

Asking the question “Why do people do the things they do?”

always with a self-reflexivity toward understanding how “Who you are” impacts what you do

Anthropological Method

A: empiricism

B: fieldwork

C: contextualization

Ethnography

A: The process of collecting anthropological data via fieldwork and

B: the product of anthropological writing and storytelling

Thick Description

• A research strategy that combines detailed description of cultural activity with an analysis of the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded

• every cultural action is more than the action itself- its also a symbol of deeper meaning

• Geertz

Perspective

Emic and Etic

Ethnocentrism

The belief that ones own culture or way of life is normal and natural; using ones own culture to evaluate and judge the practices and ideals of others-

Power

• the ability or potential to bring about change through actions or influence

• is often “naturalized”: it is profoundly culturally- constructed but appears inevitable, natural, or god-given

Habitus

self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes developed in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape ones conception of the world and where one fits in it

Nature vs Culture

A long standing debate on what factors- such as biology, genes, culture, and language determine or even predetermine human behavior and potential

Making the familiar strange

• anthropological perspective on other cultures enables us to perceive our own culture activities in a new light

• even the most familiar practices might seem exotic, bizarre, or strange when seen through the lens of anthropology

Social Business

how people exercise power during interactions and how people create identities and values through social discourse

symbolic/ interpretative anthropology

culture is primarily a set of ideas or knowledge shared by a group of people that provides a shared body of information about how to behave, why behave that way, and what the behavior means

• has to do with interpreting symbols

Positionality

A methodology that requires researchers to identify how factors of race, class, educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship, among others, intersect to influence what they study, what kind of data they can access, what conclusions they come to, and how they represent themselves and others

Reflexivity

A continual internal dialogue and critical self- evaluation of a researchers positionality as well as active acknowledgement and explicit recognition that this position may affect the research process and outcome

Armchair Anthropology

early anthropologists developed their theories of the human condition based on written accounts and opinions of others, having no direct contact with the people they wrote about

Salvage Anthropology

fieldwork strategy developed by Franz Boas to collect cultural, material, linguistic, and biological information about indigenous populations being devastated by western expansion of European settlers

Experimental Ethnography

Anthropological writing that blurs the boundaries between genres, disciplines, and theoretical positions

Intersectionality

An analytic framework developed by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life changes and societal patterns of stratification

Culture

• a system of knowledge, beliefs, patters of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people

• it is humans guide for understanding and interacting with the people and world around us

Social Darwinism/ Cultural evolution

The debunked theory proposed by nineteenth century anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve though the same sequence of stages from simple to complex

Race

• a framework of categories created by Western Europeans to divide the human population

• flawed system of classification with no biological basis that uses certain physical characteristics to divide human population into discrete groups

• socially constructed

Colonialism

Practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions

Racism

• peoples thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privileged, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups

Cultural Relativism

Understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context without making judgements (“seeing within”)

Kinship

The system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights, and responsibilities

Nuclear Family

A kinship configuration developed in Western industrialized cultures as families adapted to a capitalist economic system that required increased mobility to follow job opportunities wherever they might lead.

In normative nuclear family, people are born into a “family of orientation: (where they grow up and develop skills), but when they reach adulthood are expected to detach from the nuclear family orientation, mate, and create a new nuclear “family of procreation” in which they reproduce and raise their own children

Multispecies Ethnography

Ethnographic research that considers the interactions of all species living on the planet to provide a more than human perspective on the world

Relatedness

A concept developed by Janet Carsten that captures more nebulous forms of connection that don’t fit into the standard idea of kinship and allows one to explore different kinds of connection such as how humans and nonhumans lives get tied up with one another

Feminist anthropology critiques of “bloodline”

The blood that supposedly holds people together as kin is a highly condensed and invested metaphor for social regulations governing inheritance and property relations.

Kinship is NOT a discrete domain of sociality but is deeply rooted in other structures of power.

stratification

The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a group or culture

egalitarian society

A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence

ranked societies

A group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are

class-based societies

A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of society’s resources, often maintained though violence (symbolic, structural, and/or direct)

social reproduction

The phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next

cultural capital

The knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources

Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”

• Writes as if he were an uninitiated stranger, “doesn’t understand”, why we do things uses distance, formal, exoticizing language analyzing acts that we think of as purely rational, functional, or technical as rights or magical acts

• Makes it seem like other people are weird and different, does harm to their image - Makes familiar strange

• How we tell the story matters, the language we use and how we frame it matters, changes perspective of cultures

• Does what anthropologists do to other cultures to our own

• Nacierma= America backwards- really about american people

• Box= medicine cabinet w drugs in it

• mouth ritual- dentist- daily mouth rite- brushing teeth

• medicine men=doctor

• believed bodies are ugly, tend toward weakness/disease, spend time daily on this ritual activity

  • focus of this activity is the human body the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of people

Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush”

• Nigeria

• Elders still able to predict the outcome of the story

• nuances of language make “universal truths” harder to convey directly: Words such as chief and leader hold distinct meanings in two countries; Different ideas about the dead and afterlife , about witchcraft and mental illness; cultural roles and kinship obligations were hard to translate

Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the balinese Cockfight”

• At first no one would talk to them; they were “nonpersons, specters, invisible men”; wasn’t until they showed their solidarity with them during raid that they were seen

• deep psychological identification between Balinese man and his rooster

• Gambling: center bet (status) vs side bets (money)

• Deep play= when the stakes are so high that it is from a utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all; make the match as even as possible

• money isnt important, its the status nut no ones actual status gets altered- more about pride

• not betting on the cock, betting on the person who put the cock in the ring; - family, friends, people you know not the best chicken since the fight is even, based on civility with group person is from who you bet one - lie alliances

• only in cockfights are sentiments of status hierarchy revealed

• symbol of masculinity

Zora Neal Hurstons “mules and men”

• complicates understanding of social dynamics in the south through ethnographic accounts of three different southern Black communities

• Eatonville, Fl: Zora accepted as a “native daughter”

• Polk county everglades Cypress Lumber Camp, Fl: first rejected her due to high socioeconomic class

• initiated in Hoodoo (Voodoo) in New Orleans: her body/psychic state become central focus- provide a place for women outside of a conventional social role

• salvage anthropology

• uses “I”, who she is matters, she’s not looking down from above on community, she writes as she’s in it

• uses multiple voices of different characters to show how meaning is subjective- polyvocality

  • uses eye-voice (non standard spelling to represent speech sound)

• Challenges assumption that ethnographer stands outside the social relations of the field and representations of fieldwork

Baker’s “The location of Franz Boas within the African American Struggle”

• Boas anti-racists though naive to complex struggles

• critiqued social Darwinism; the problem of racial inequality was white racism not racial inferiority

• Boas sided with Du Bois; Washington thought African Americans in industry, trade, and practical skills would give them equality, by fitting in they’d be seen as equal

• Du Bois said they needed to demand equality, wanted them in higher education, use force and don’t just “fit in”

• influenced Columbia anthropologists and eventually orchestrated a paradigmatic shift in the scientific discourse on race

• became a crucial link between the Columbian anthropologists and the radical intellectuals of the NAACP

Audrey Smedley’s “Race and the construction of human identity”

• “race” is a cultural invention, that is bears no intrinsic relationship to actual human physical variations, but reflects social meanings imposed upon these variations

• there are no “racial” designations in the literature of the ancients; biological variations among humans were not given social meaning

• “Race” developed in the minds of some Europeans as a way to rationalize the conquests and brutal treatment of Native American populations, and especially the retention and perpetuation of slavery for imported Africans

• When race appeared in human history, it brought about a subtle but powerful transformation in the world’s perceptions of human differences. Since that time many people in the West have continued to link human identity to external physical features.

Lila Abu-Lughods “Do muslim women really need saving”

• dangers of reifying (objectifying) culture

• many meanings of the veil- need to seriously appreciate differences among women; Muslim women see veil as empowering modesty

• use of human rights discourse to justify military colonial invasions and occupation

• we need to look closely at what causes we are supporting/not and why

• not about accepting all difference without judgement but “can we accept that there might be different ideas about justice and that different women might want or choose different futures from what we envision is best?”

• cultural relativism vs respecting cultural differences

Radhika Govindrajans “The goat who died for family”

• sacrificial rituals affirmed the relationship between devotee and the gods

• principle of substitution between sacrificer and victim: “But giving an animal is live giving a human”

• gendered labor of raising animals; where mamta (maternal love) is given; “affective kinship”

• interspecies reciprocity and relationality: women raise and care for goats; goats are indebted to women for raising and caring for them and give their lives for them

• sacrificial relationships are marked by practices of care, attention, and reciprocity that emerge thought everyday, gendered forms of labor involved in raising animals who are eventually sacrificed

Judith Butlers “Kinship beyond the bloodline”

• there is no single set of structure/ relations that define kin

• kinship was established less by lines of descent or bloodlines than by modes of belonging mediated by immigration law for Chinese migrants during the 20th century

• kinship tends to assume modes of relatedness that are too often reliant on sexual reproduction

• genetics increasingly defines and constrains the meaning of kinship

• feminist anthropologists sought to move the study of kinship away from sexual reproduction

Seth Holmes “Ch4 How the poor Suffer: In fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States”

• direct embodiment of the violence continuum: political violence of land wars; structural violence of neoliberal capitalism and labor hierarchies; Normalized everyday violence between Triqui migrants and healthcare providers

• Health disparities fall along citizenship, ethnicity, and class lines

• suffering the hierarchy: Lower in hierarchy, more physical/mental suffering

• Abelino: knee pain caused by layers of structural violence NAFTA and border policy, only job was picking berries, no breaks, benefits, or health insurance

• Crescencio: Socially structured headache: Racism and disrespect causing symptoms- self medication

• Bernardo: chronic stomach pain; torture and violence in home state

Humanity is one undivided thing, but

we are extraordinarily diverse

Anthropological method related to empiricism

philosophical and scientific concept that emphasizes the role of experience, evidence, and observation in the formation of knowledge

Anthropological method related to fieldwork

Research strategy for understanding the world through intense interaction with a local community of people over an extended period of time

Anthropological method related to contextualization

• research approach that elucidates the dynamic relationship between phenomena on all scales

• connections between phenomena make up complex and often invisible webs of relationships

Emic Perspective

An approach to gathering data that investigates how local people think and how they understand the world, grasping the world according to ones interlocutors particular points of view

Etic perspective

A description of local behavior and beliefs from the anthropologists perspective in ways that can be compared across cultures