Cultural Anthropology Final Study Guide

Colonialism

A practice in which one state or group exerts control over another territory and its inhabitants, characterized by political dominance, occupation by settlers, and resource extraction

The ethnographic “present”

The artificail construction of a time before contact with European culture

Edward Curtis

Photographer who deliberately showed Native Americans in a way reminiscent of the pre-contact past, ignoring modern Native life in the early 20th century

Eric Wolf

Author of Europe and the People Without History (1982), a broad overview of the global connections of power and economy between 1400 and 1900

Fur trade

An example of interconnectedness and changes in Native populations before European colonization, European pre-colonial influences partially led to the establishbent of the Iroquois ccnfederacy

Exploitative colonialism

One nation-state take a foreign territory for its resources, exploits the local people for their labor and imports slave labor, ex. Jamaica

Patrick Wolfe

Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, theory of settler colonialism where colonialism is a strucuture focused on acquiring and securing land

Settler colonialism

The acquisition of territory/land at any cost

Audra Simpson

Mohawk Interruptus, the maintenance of political sovereignty among the Kahnawa:ke during settler colonialism, ethnographic refusal research method

Oka crisis

1990 land dispute between a group of Mohawk people and the town of Oka, Quebec, well-publicized

Ethnographic refusal

A methodology that resists revealing everything and takes people’s refusals as generative

Indian act of 1890 and C-31

Canadian laws that attempted to define Native tribal membership, nested sovereigty between tribal nations and settler governments

Cultural and political decolonization

Involves questioning, resisting, and uprooting Eurocentric norms and recovering histories, languages, and philosophies that were suppressed under colonial rule. Centering indigenous perspectives and “decolonizing” curriculums, institutions, and community spaces

Tuck and Yang

Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012), incommensurability of decolonization with the current political system

James Baldwin

1924-1987, American writer of Go Tell it on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son

Teju Cole

Leukerbad in 2014, complicating Baldwin’s reading of strangers and the changing of cultural hegemony

Patrick Tierney

Darkness in El Dorado, misrepresented key dynamics of Yanomami society and contributed to warfare, staged films and fabricated data

Davi Kopenawa

A Yanomami spokesperson, emphasized writing “with” rather than about

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1976), controversy about lack of anonymity and recognition within community

Ruth Behar

The Vulnerable Observer, how anthropologists struggle with the question of vulnerability

Carole McGranahan

Ethnographic sensibility, ethnography as a way of knowing or a way of being in or seeing the world

Ethnographic sensibility

A genre of ethnography that stresses self-reflectivity, long-term fieldwork, cultural context, following detours, and making an argument

Jason Pine

The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition