Social and cultural anthropology- week 1

cultural anthropology

• Study of human societies, cultures, and behaviors, with an emphasis on understanding the diversity of cultural practices, beliefs, customs,  and social structures across different groups and regions 

• Often comparative- study similarities

Importance of cultural anth today

• The world is getting smaller 

• It allows us to understand people who are different from us without judging them 

• It has an essential set of skills for the workforce today 

  • Interest in people 

  • Understanding of diversity 

  • Ability to work with others 

What is culture ?

• A set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared 

  • Beliefs- all mental aspects of culture (values, comvictions, assumptions, worldview, etc) 

  • Practices- behaviors and actions (everyday actions, customs, ceremonies, other social activities etc.) 

  • Symbols- Meanings of cultural objects and ideas (representational elements such as words, gestures, images, objects, rituals, etc.) 

Characteristics of culture

• Humans have the capacity to learn any culture- cultiure is learned and socially transmitted across generations 

• Culture changes in response to internal and external factors- cant keep thinking about it as ‘the’ culture- it changes 

• Humans are not bound by culture, can choose to resist or change it 

• Culture is symbolic 

• Our reliance on culture distinguishes us from other animals and shaped our evolution

Ex; goth subculture

Beliefs: Death, non conformity, tied to victorian era, horror, macabre

Practices: Heavy pale makeup, collections of items (wanting to bequeath to one another), collecting and decorating in a certain way, music itself- attending concerts, being in a band, etc. 

Symbols, Material culture: Collection of symbolic items, beliefs around death and mortality and how they're represented, symbols from paganism, christianity, egyptian gothic culture, biblical sin, symbols of death, and the way you dress- black, leather, metal hardware, spikes, etc

multiple subcultures- Mexico; darks, Gotica- more punk, aspects of mexican culture, own music in apapropriate language, different historical aspects and motivations (protest against gender violence in thier community)

Goth culture- japan; Also adapted and taken up differently- fashion mixes high fashion and street fashion as well as western elements, music has j pop and rock groups. Also anime and manga based around goth subculture in japan. 

Holism

• idea that no ‘part’ of a culture exists by itself and that aspects of culture should be viewed in the context of other cultural elements. 

• For this reason, anthropologists use what we call a holistic perspective to study culture 

• Rather than using a naive approach that expects to simply and easily delineate a single part of culture in which we are interested, we instead seek out the connections between cultural institutions like religious beliefs, kinship systems (family structure), economies, gender ideology, political life, cultural understandings of health, and much more. 

• This is also why we use multiple fields of anthropology to examine human culture. 

Holism example; Tibet

practice of polyandry- women marry more than one man, for example a man and his brothers. Not for a fetishistic reason, but because of economic concerns and resource concerns. Easier to allocate resources in this form. 

Enculturation

• Cultural knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next, from parents and other adults to children, through the process of enculturation 

• E.g. gender role enculturation 

what is and isnt culture?

Isnt; physical features or natural environment. Universal human traits like the need fir food, shelter. Instinctual behaviors- reflexes and survival instincts.

Not based on biology

But, biology and culture are interrelated

• Ex; Lactase Persistence (ability to digest lactose (milk sugar) in adulthood, and its influenced by both biology and culture. Biologically its linked to genetic variations in the LCT gene, enabling the continued production of lactase. 

• Culturally, its tied to societies where dairy farming is significant, as lactase persistence offers a nutritional advantage. 

• Ex; Body modification 

Society

•  Shares geographical space, similar rules of behavior (customs, beliefs, laws), institutions (e.g. Canadian society) 

Community

•  People who live, work, play together and/ or are connected by cultural norms and values (e.g. Mennonite community in Alberta; Ucalgary student community) 

  • Communities can be defined based on identity markers like ethnicity, religion, interests, etc.

Homogenous

• A group sharing many identity markers is homogenous. E.g. Hadza people of Tanzania 

  • Does not mean everyone belonging to a culture is the same in every way

Heterogenous

•  A group sharing few identity markers is Heterogenous. IN a heterogenous society, many languages, religious beliefs, and ethnicities exist, but all share a set of understandings. E.g. Canadians. 

Ethnography

 ethnos (folk, people, nation) graohy (i write) 

• Ethnographic research- the oriocess of studying culture. The product of this study is ethnography 

• Anthropologists produce ethnographies (written descriptions of a community or cultural practice). In order to produce a good ethnography, we need to be able to conduct participant observation 

Participant observation

• Participant observation- critical to most anthropological research today 

• Stay for an extended period of time 

• Learn the local language 

• Explore the ‘mundane imponderabilit”- Anthropologists strive to make sense of cultural practuces that seem ‘strange’ while equally trying to identify what might be unique or ‘strange’ from an outsiders perspective in order to highlight what, exactly, is a social construct in our own cultures 

• “Get off the veranda”- actively participate in the cultural practices of the people you are studying. It is only by getting pff the veranda and participating, while also observing, that we can ever fully know the people that we are studying 

Ethnohgraphic methods

• Fieldwork- living and working among study participants 

• Participant observation 

  • Develops rapport with participants/ community men=mbers 

• Conversations and interviews 

• Life histories 

• Genealogy 

• Work with key informants/ associates 

• Photograpohy 

• Field notes 

Etic perspective

An outsiders view; an objective explanation 

an etic perspective focuses on the observable functions of a practice it does not focus on what cultural insiders think of, what they care about, or how they describe this event when they reflect on it 

• It is a way of observing a culture without the preconceptions, attitudes, or cultural knowledge of its members. E.g. an anthropologist may look at the breakfast event and examine the calories ingested, the economic, social and familial responsibilities, the function it serves for the family (sharing scheduled before departing for the day etc). 

Emic perspective

Emic; an insiders view; the perspective of the subject 

when we take an emic perspective, we are looking at the world around us through the eyes of a particular culture, interpreting it in terms of their beliefs, preconceptions, and categories 

• To cultural insiders, an event (like breakfast) is both familiar and meaningful and carries its own symbolic importance due to the specific cultural information they have come to possess through the process of enculturation