ANTH 101 01
Week 1
Homework Reading (08/26/2025)
Talks about what food our ancestors ate
Was it healthy, was it just food, did it have calories but could negatively affect them?
The food is not the same as they had (Page 8).
The fruits and vegetables are grown differently
The wildlife is dramatically different than the animals that were available at the time of our ancient ancestors.
Does the argument assume there’s just one way our ancient ancestors behaved? If so, how true is that, really?
No, it doesn’t. It depends on the geographical location. Certain food items were not available in certain regions.
Does the argument assume we accurately know what our ancient ancestors did? If so, how accurate is our actual knowledge?
It doesn’t. There isn’t any way to tell exactly what our ancestors lived off or what they did. We essentially have strong educated guesses.
Does the argument assume that the behaviors that were optimal for our
ancestors’ survival are optimal for ours now? If so, do we really have good
reason to believe this?No our behaviors are not optimal. We eat things everyday that are tailored to us. The article states that a lot of the things our ancestors did are no longer available to us today.
Does the argument assume that a certain modern behavior closely resembles what our ancient ancestors did? If so, how close is that behavior to the behavior of our ancestors, really?
No it does not assume. The behaviors are not close or similar in anyway. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer based society.
Does the argument slip from ‘is’ to ‘ought’? If so, can that really be justified, and do I share the values that it relies on?
Adding “ought” does not add values to the statement in my opinion.
Class Notes (08/26/2025)
Jack shit that is posted on Canvas will be graded.
Pop-up quizzes (25% of total grade)
2 midterms (50% of total grade)
One multiple choice, one in-class essay
Final (25% of total grade)
In-class
If you stroke him and journal everyday about class after class he will bump your grade up.
Homework reading (08/28/2025)
Instructions
Culture by Contrast and Theory in Anthropology (Library Website)
Who are Hobbes and Rousseau and why are they important to cultural anthropology?
Hobbes and Roussea are philosophers.
Hobbes used savages to assert that humans in a state of nature would be fearful of and violent toward one another.
Roussea used what Europeans in the Americas were learning about savages to claim that humans in a state of nature were altruistic and cooperative.
Both are opposites of one another.
Hobbes = violence
Roussea = Peace/Cooperative
What is the role of the savage in our thinking about human differences and similarities?
Everyone besides our consideration of “civilized” are savages.
Savages felt a certain longing for a lost way of life or a sense of superiority made all the more profound by the savage’s abjection.
If savages differed, it was because of differing social circumstances.
Where are the Lauje located?
Lauje of Sulawesi, Indonesia
Where are the Manjaco located?
Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau, West Africa
Geertz Reading
What does Geertz think about the Enlightenment idea that culture is like a costume that hides or covers over an essential human nature? Note that Geertz calls this idea “a uniformitarian view of man.” Why does he choose this term?
Geertz calls this the “uniformitarian view of man” because it assumes a constant, homogeneous human essence that exists everywhere, unaffected by cultural differences.
He rejects this because (according to bro) humans cannot exist apart from culture. There is no backstage where “real persons” exist outside culture roles.
What troubles Geertz about this"stratigraphic" conception of the relations between biology, psychology, society, and culture? Geertz argues that both the Enlightenment view and the “stratigraphic” view of humans are, in essence, “typological” (p. 51). What does he mean?
Geertz dislikes this cause it portrays culture as a detachable overlay on an other wise finished thing. It suggests human nature could be understood by peeling away cultural layers.
He calls is “typologicial” because they treat “human nature” as a fixed type with culture as either
Irrelevant decoration (Uniforitarianism)
Secondary Layer (Stratigraphic)
Both imply a”man” that stands outside actual lived cultural variation.
If Geertz dislikes both a uniformitarian view of man and a stratigraphic model, what does Geertz believe about culture—what is his "concept of culture"?
(According to bro) culture is not an overlay or costume. It is constitutive of human existence.
Humans are "incomplete” animals whose behavior would be chaotic without symbolic systems.
Culture provides the symbolic patterns that make human life coherent and intelligible.
Why does he talk about culture as “recipes”?
(According to bro) culture as a set of “recipes” for behavior because culture provides models, guides, and patterns for action.
Like a recipe, cultural patterns are not deterministic laws but flexible instructions:
They offer a symbolic script through which humans act meaningfully.
Why would the phrase he uses early on, “to seek complexity and order it” frame his approach to the analysis of cultural materials? Or what about his quick analogy between cathedrals and men… “they too, every last one of them, are cultural artifacts” (p.51).
He means that culture cannot be reduced to simple laws or universal essences. Instead anthro must embrace complexity and bring analytical order to them.
His analogy that “men, like cathedrals, are cultural artifacts” underscores this point. Just as a cathedral is not just stone and mortar but a symbolic construction embodying meanings, so too are human beings products of cultural systems.
Likewise why does he cite approvingly the Javanese proverb “Other fields, other grasshoppers.”
Roughly “different places, different ways” to affirm cultural relativity.
It shows his view that human beings cannot be abstacted form the particular symbolic fields they inhabit.
Finally, what does Geertz say about the role of culture in human evolution?
Insists that culture and biology evolved together. Three main points:
Overlap:
Biological and cultural evolution are not sequential but interactive.
Brain development:
The main biological changes in becoming human were neurological, enabling symbolic thought.
Incompleteness:
Humans are biologically “unfinished” animals who need culture to survive.
Week 2
09/02/2025 Homework Reading
What are some general features of ethnographic research which in anthropology is commonly referred to as "fieldwork"?
Long-term, immersive study where anthropologists live with a community, observe daily life, participate in activities, and record cultural practices from inside.
What is a "vernacular anthropology"?
When people in a community interpret and explain their own culture in their own terms, rather than relying only on on the anthropologist’s category.
What is cultural relativism?
The idea that beliefs and practices must be understood within their own cultural context, not judged against outside standards.
What is "biological essentialism" (also called biological determinism)?
The belief that human behavior and social differences are caused by biological factors (e.g. race,
What is holism in anthropology?
Studying human life as an interconnected whole —linking kinship, politics, economy, ritual, language, etc. — rather than isolating single aspects.
Moral mutuality, what is it?
The ethical principle that researcher and community share a responsibility and obligations toward each other in the field.
Why is eating a map of a social group in Manjaco?
Meals mark social boundaries and relationships, — who eats with whom reflects the structure of kinship, hierarchy, and belonging.
Why is standing in a line a model in the sense Geertz thought of the term?
Lining up is a simple social art but also a cultural model; it expresses order, fairness, and shared rules — symbols of how a society organizes people in relation to one another.
09/02/2025
Fieldwork and ethnography as concepts and processes
Writing a grant: Science/government endorses the project by paying for it. But they have to be convinced. Research therefore must be relevant (as defined in various ways).
Getting permission to go to the “field” (echoes of natural history; thus why we often start our stories with a landscape).
Anthropology is a natural history.
We have two sciences we deal with:
Experimental Science
We have a hypothesis and test is.
Natural History (This is Anthropology)
We have a pretty world out there that is constantly performing experiments for us. We just have to study those experiments.
Think global warming or climate change.
The data comes from events that are currently happening.
Living with your research subject who become your friends, your fellow researchers, your interlocutors looking, doing, talking, listening. In anthropology, the anthropologist is the instrument. Participant observation.
Changing topics: fieldwork and serendipity. Your topic changes because of the conversations you have, the events you witness; because of what you didn’t know before you got there.
Lauje
People who live in a landscape which they exploit through farming and other methods.
They are very mobile on the landscape though:
They will cut the trees down and start farming on it. Then they will move, allow the trees to go back (rinse and repeat).
They were dart goblins using the high ground.
Manjaco of Guinea Bissau
Migrants, wet-rice farmers; aristocrats and commoners.
A kingdom own most of the property (1600ish) and than kings/chiefs were given property by the government.
This tribe has duties just for men and duties just for women.
They are dependent on each other though, men get the materials for food and women need to make it.
Week 3
09/09/2025 (Homework) + Class
Jefferson’s Contradictions
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson argued that African Americans were biologically inferior to whites in intelligence while being more passionate or “ardent”.
He positioned white people as the balance between supposed extremes: African ardor and Asian restraint.
These claims rationalized slavery and embedded the idea that differences in culture and ability were rooted in biology.
Influence on later though
Jefferson’s framework influenced modern pseudo-science, including arguments by J. Phillipe Rushton and popularized works like The Bell Curve.
Such theories perpetuate stereotypes about African Americans’ academic performance and incarceration rates, grounding them in “biology” rather than systemic inequality.
This racial logic makes it difficult to imagine a “color-blind” society, since race became encoded as both a visible and “natural” difference.
Implications at Monticello
At Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation and now a museum, his legacy produces tensions. Exhibitions struggle to present both Jefferson’s achievements and his reliance on slavery.
Visitors often experience “virtual segregation”: white visitors identify with Jefferson’s lineage, while Black visitors connect with enslaved ancestors. This division underscores how Jefferson’s racial framework still shapes memory, identity, and inequality today
Short
Jefferson’s Ardor reveals how Jefferson fused Enlightenment ideals with racial hierarchy, embedding the notion that whites embodied the perfect balance of reason and passion. This framework still haunts U.S. race relations, from pseudo-scientific racism to struggles at Monticello, and it highlights anthropology’s task of disentangling culture from biology while defending human equality.
Race and colonialism (Class Notes Start Here)
Anthropology’s emergence as a discipline in the context of late 19th century colonialism, and in the context of increasing dominance of scientific racism in Western societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Spanish American War and the Philippines.
How can a European country by moral and take up other chunks of real estate?
The people that were doing the exploiting and killing had to look in the mirror and say they are doing a good deed.
If a black person goes to Oxford won’t they technically be the same as Europeans because they receive the “European Golden Education”. (Krish words not Gable words)
The Europeans believe that colored people will never be like them because they look different. Doesn’t matter if all living conditions were the same.
Nazi race science and American Race science compared.
Racial Purity as an aspirational goal.
Miscegenation Laws.
Finagling the data to maintain the illusion of racial boundaries.
Werner Goldberg example.
His dad was a Jew but they didn’t realize so they used him as a poster boy to show what a “perfect” German was built like. They erased his ass quickly from the German textbooks.
09/11/2025
Anthropology’s emergence as a discipline in the context of late 19th century colonialism, and in the context of increasing dominance of scientific racism in western societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Spanish American War and the Philippines.
Week 4
09/16/2025 Homework “The Colonialist Dress-Code”
Bush’s Speech and the word “liberty”
When Bush equates liberty with respect for women, property, and tolerance, he is dressing America in a colonialist uniform. He insists that U.S. values are “universal,” even while saying “we have no intention of imposing our culture.” This is exactly what the colonialist dress code did: wrap domination in the appearance of benevolence. “Liberty” becomes a garment that makes Western ways of life appear morally superior and more civilized — justifying intervention abroad.
Missionaries, colonialism, and “moral universalism”
Missionaries historically were among the first to enforce the colonial dress code: teaching people how to dress, pray, and behave according to Western standards. In Shweder’s metaphor, the “missionary position” stands for moral universalism — the belief that there is only one correct morality for all people. Missionaries believed they were spreading salvation and decency, but in practice, they imposed new hierarchies. The “dress” of universalism hides the naked truth of cultural imposition.
Plural Relativism, contextual-ism, subjectivism
Shweder contrasts universalism with four relativist alternatives.
Pluralism: Many moral truths exist, like many acceptable ways of dressing.
Relativism: Morality is tied to cultures; each culture’s “dress code” fits only them.
Contextualism: Morality depends on situations — just as the right dress depends on the occasion.
Subjectivism: Morality is individual preference, like personal style.
All four are counter-colonialist because they resist the idea that one cultural “dress code” is naturally superior.
Repugnance and mutuality
Shweder notes that what some find good, others find morally repugnant. For example: Americans value individual autonomy (ethics of autonomy), while many societies value obligations to kin and community (ethics of community). Each side looks at the other’s practices — whether sexual freedom or ritual cutting — and feels horror. Repugnance is mutual because each assumes its own moral dress code is the standard. The colonialist mistake is to see only the Other’s code as strange or inferior, never our own. A relativist approach counsels humility: someone can feel “free” in communal obligations just as another feels “free” in personal autonomy.
09/16/2025
What does Monticello tell us about Thomas Jefferson’s Attitude about human nature?
Week 5
09/23/2025 (Reading)
Gable examines how photography in anthropology is never neutral but tied to colonial history, tourism, and the anthropologist’s own desires. Like tourists, anthropologists seek “authenticity” yet inevitably frame, stage, and aestheticize their subjects. Images of Manjaco villagers—women fishing, scarified girls, or kings in European suits—reveal blurred boundaries between tradition and modernity, often judged against a colonial “dress code” of what counts as civilized. Funerals, dances, and “neo-traditions” show how locals creatively combine old forms with global influences, while emigrants use ritual to display both cosmopolitan success and ties to home. Gable argues that anthropology itself grew out of colonial ways of seeing, often replicating stereotypes of “pristine primitives” or “bad copies” of Europeans. The chapter highlights the tension between cultural relativism and anthropology’s complicity in colonial representation, showing that the anthropologist’s “dress code” is not so different from the colonialist’s.
09/23/2025 (Class)
What mistakes did professor make in the field?
This is basically what the entire class is about today.
Taking pictures in the Field or, the anthropologist’s dress code and how that compares to what tourists and colonial officers do.
Anthropology and modernity
Things have changed since he wrote the book.
It is now common for people to use their cell phones to take images, before 2010 it was not common.
Take photos of thing that are memories of random things.
Has memories, feelings, etc. attached to it.
These photographs are associated with a British anthropologist. He spent a decade a half working in Eastern Africa.
09/25/2025
The funeral and modernity. How to interpret a manjaco funeral in the context of hard to avoid contrasts between tradition and modernity.
In modern society’s funerals are less important than weddings.
Funerals are also cheaper, you can cremate for a few hundred bucks.
Tourism in Guinea-Bissau and Sulawesi
Or, what kinds of imagined communities, to borrow from Benedict Anderson, does intra-national tourism make?
Week 6
09/30/2025 Homework Reading
Harris on the pig taboo.
Harris begins with the dilemma of land use: is it more efficient to grow crops for direct human consumption or to divert those crops to feed livestock? From a survival standpoint, plants capture calories more efficiently, but humans eat meat for cultural and ecological reasons.
Pigs are unique compared to other domesticated animals:
Advantages:
They produce meat quickly, taste good, and have high reproductive rates.
Disadvantages:
They don’t provide milk, labor, or wool. Require grain that humans could eat, and need shade and water that are scarce in the Middle Eastern Environment.
Because pigs compete directly with humans for food and can’t be sustained easily in Israel’s ecology. Harris argues that raising them was “maladaptive”.
The religious population insitutionalized what was already ecologically sensible: avoiding pigs helped conserve resources and improved chances of group survival.
For Harris, religioun reflects material conditions rather than transcending them. Food taboos are practical adaptations disguised as sacred law.
Importantly, Harris predicts that if ecological conditions were different (more water, forest cover), pigs might not have been taboo. This shows how flexible and adaptive he sees culture.
09/30/2025 Class.
Food/consumption in the middle east
A lot of those in the middle east can’t eat pork, bats
10/02/2025 Reading.
Douglas sees humans as motivated by the pursuit and maintenance of meaning rather than survival efficiency. Culture works like a language with rules and structure.
Food taboos are not about cost-benefit but about symbolic order. Categories like edible and pure reflect cultural boundaries. The choice of foods is largely arbitrary across societies.
Some cultures eat dogs while others see them as mans best friend.
Animals that don’t fit neatly into categories are considered dangerous or polluting. In Israel, pigs had cloven hooves but did not chew cud - they fell between categories, making them symbolically unclean.
Holiness is tied to maintaining order in creation. Pollution comes from things that blur boundaries or cross categories. Taboos mark out purity by reinforcing the boundaries between categories of life.
Religion, for Douglas, is not utilitarian, but symbolic. It encodes systems of classification and helps people maintain a sense of order in the cosmos.
Israeli’s didn’t necessarily reject pork because of its flavor. Disgust was cultural, tied to its symbolic status, not to its material properties.
Harris vs. Douglas.
Douglas:
Pigs violate categories.
Religion: Encodes systems of classification.
View of taste: Disgust with pork is cultural, not biological.
They weren’t rejected for flavor but for culture.
Main: Food rules are about sustaining a meaningful system of order, not practical survival.
Harris:
Raising pigs in the middle east was not adaptive — pigs compete with humans for grain and water.
Religion: Institutionalize adaptive behavior; taboos ensure people avoided ecologically costly practices.
Pork is tasty and religion is necessary to override temptation and enforce the ban.
Main: Food rules are cultural adaptations to ecological pressures.
Main
Douglas: Taboos are about symbolic boundaries and maintaining purity.
Harris: Taboos are about ecological adaptation and group survival.
Religion: For Douglas, it creates and maintains order; for Harris, it enforces practical adaptations.
Taste: For Douglas, disgust is symbolic; for Harris, it’s overridden by religious law despite pork’s appeal.
10/02/2025
First Paragraph of Mary Douglass
Week 7
Midterm Studying
1. “Jefferson’s Ardor” – Egalitarianism, Racism, and Cultural Relativism
Jefferson’s writings reveal how American egalitarianism—an ideal of human equality—developed alongside modern racism. He believed all men were created equal, yet justified slavery and Native removal through claims of innate difference. This contradiction stems from the tension between universal equality and social hierarchy. Egalitarianism promised equality in principle but required distinctions in practice to preserve privilege. Anthropology’s later idea of cultural relativism emerged partly to challenge this logic, arguing that human difference is cultural, not biological. Yet, both egalitarianism and relativism share the desire to explain difference while maintaining a belief in moral universality. Jefferson’s struggle captures how American equality depends on—and constantly wrestles with—racial classification.
2. Harris vs. Douglas – Why the Pig Was Forbidden
Marvin Harris (cultural materialist) and Mary Douglas (symbolic anthropologist) explain Israelite pig taboos differently. Harris argues the ban was adaptive: pigs were ecologically costly in the Middle East because they competed with humans for food and water, offered no secondary benefits (milk, labor, wool), and could spread disease. Religion encoded this ecological wisdom as divine law. Douglas, in contrast, sees the taboo as symbolic: pigs were “impure” because they broke classification rules in Leviticus—they had cloven hooves but did not chew cud. For her, holiness was about maintaining order in creation. Harris explains the rule’s practicality; Douglas its meaning. Harris’s strength lies in ecological logic, while Douglas’s lies in uncovering moral symbolism. Together, they show religion as both adaptive and meaningful.
3. “Standing in a Line” – Monticello and the American Idea of Equality
In “Standing in a Line,” Gable shows how waiting in line at Monticello becomes a performance of American egalitarianism. Visitors line up equally, but within that line, differences of class, race, and expertise re-emerge. The line functions as a model, in Clifford Geertz’s sense, both representing and enacting American ideals of fairness and frustration with hierarchy. People question who gets to go first, who deserves access, and who defines expertise—mirroring democratic tensions in society. The experience demonstrates that even everyday acts like queueing express the contradictions of equality in a stratified nation.
4. “The Colonialist’s Dress Code” and Cannibal Tours
Gable’s “The Colonialist’s Dress Code” argues that colonialism wasn’t only political domination but also moral and aesthetic—expressed through appearance and performance. In Cannibal Tours, European tourists visiting Papua New Guinea reenact colonial hierarchies by treating locals as exotic spectacles. Their clothing, cameras, and behavior reproduce the visual codes of civilization versus savagery. Similarly, anthropologists’ “dress codes” historically mirrored colonial assumptions of superiority and control, even when claiming objectivity. Both the tourist and the anthropologist project modernity onto “primitive” others, revealing how visual culture and moral posture sustain colonial power relations.
5. “Supping with Savages” – Eating, Community, and Relationship
Gable’s “Supping with Savages” compares Manjaco (Guinea-Bissau) and Lauje (Sulawesi) eating practices to show how food organizes social life. Among the Manjaco, communal eating expresses kinship and reinforces social hierarchy—elders and men are served first, reflecting respect and order. Among the Lauje, meals are more egalitarian, emphasizing sharing and interdependence. Eating together models moral relationships not only among people but with non-human others—spirits, ancestors, and animals. Food is thus a medium for performing identity and moral order, revealing how everyday acts like eating encode deep cultural values.
6. Cultural Relativism vs. Universalism
Cultural relativism holds that moral values and practices must be understood within their cultural contexts; no culture’s way is inherently superior. Yet anthropology also recognizes certain human universals (like empathy or justice). The tension arises because relativism promotes tolerance, while universalism asserts shared human rights. Anthropologists use relativism both as an empirical method—to understand others without judgment—and as an ethical stance—to challenge ethnocentrism. The conflict reminds us that while cultural norms differ, understanding them is essential before evaluating them.
7. Jefferson’s Indian Hall and Parlor – Human Difference and Similarity
Jefferson’s Indian Hall and Parlor at Monticello display artifacts from Native Americans and classical antiquity side by side, revealing his effort to reconcile belief in human equality with racial hierarchy. The arrangement shows admiration for Native ingenuity but places it within a framework of Western progress: Indians were “earlier” in civilization’s timeline. The spaces embody Jefferson’s ambivalence—he saw all humans as sharing potential but believed cultures moved through developmental stages, with Europeans at the peak. The display materializes Enlightenment ideas of progress and difference—equality in theory, hierarchy in practice.