WEEK 9: HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

3/18/2024

Humans and the Envionment

• Do all people understand nature in the same way?

• How have anthropologists analzyed human relationships with nature?

• What are the cultural implications of various approaches to environmental conservation and protection?

Environmental Anthropology

• Studies how different cultures understand, interact with, and make changes to the environment

• Need to understand people’s ideas about the environment in order to understand their behavior within it

Other words to talk about the Environment: Wilderness, Nature, Mother (Nature), Ecosystem, Habitat, Wildlife, Great Outdoors, Planet, Earth, Climate, Cycle

What is the role of humans / where are they:

Culture & the environment

• Culture has helped us to adapt to a wide variety of terrestrial habitats

1. Culture enables people to learn, catalogue, share, and communicate important

Whike human cultures allow us to be creative with our environments, nature places limits on human development as well.

• Adaptationalist paradigm (mid 20th ce

The Anthropocene: our current period in geological time.

• Defined by the effects of human activities (converting forests into fields/pastures; large-scale burning of oil/gas/goal) on the environment and on the earth’s atmosphere.

• To understand the Anthropocene, geology, chemistry, and meteorology should be informed by the study of humans and culture and how we interact with the environment.

Our environment is anthropogenic (shaped by humans)

• ~ 10,000 years ago, the development of human agriculture set the stage for current human-environment interactions.

1. Human efforts to share the landscape.

Ecological footprint

People in different parts of the world have different impacts on the environment.

1. In general, people in industralized countries have much bigger ecological footprints.

2. While Americans make up only 5 percent of the world’s population, they consume 25% of its resources

How is a cultural perspective useful for understanding contemporary environmental crises?

• Sociocultural processes shape how people think of nature and the beliefs they carry about appropriate relationships with it

Some of these beliefs

Wilderness

• Parts of “nature” that are undisturbed by humans and humans activity

• Does nature exist outside of human activities?

1. A philosophical question: “nature” exists only insofar as it is contrasted with “non-nature”

2. A practical question: there are few, if any, parts of the world that have not been affected in some way by human activity (i.e., food production, transportation, habitation, manufacturing byproducts…)

3/22/2024

The myth of the ecologically “noble savage”

• A many centuries-old ideology that portrays indigenous groups as particularly connected to the environment.

• This ideology is problematic because:

1. It constructs indigenous groups as an imagined “other” (in opposition to Westerners)

2. It overly simplified indigenous worldviews, not recognizing complexities.

3. It understands indigenous

Land Claims

• For indigenous groups, often what is more important than “relationships with the environment” is legal control over their historial lands.

• Part of the anthropological study of humans and the environment is asking the humans in question why/how the given environment matters to them

1. Different people often have very

WEEK 10: FOOD

3/25/2024

How do people secure an adequate, meaningful, and environmentally sustainable food supply?

Modes of Subsistence - the social relationship and practices necessary for procuring, producing, and distributing food.

Four main modes of subsistence:

• Foraging: or the search for edible things

• Horiculture: or small scale subsistence agriculture

• Pastoralism: or the raising of animal herds

• Intensive agriculture: large-scale, often commercial, agriculture

Food, Culture, Meaning

Foodways are permeated by cultural beliefs and governed by systematic rules and etiquette.

• Rules regulate what animals people hunt, what plants they grow, and how they share, prepare, and eat food. These rules are all culturally constructed and differ from one society to the next.

Specific foods can unite people when they are together and symbolically connect them when they are separated.

• Food can also communicate division and unequal power relations.

• For example, “sumptuary laws” restricted certain foods to preferred social classes.

• Example: Holy Communion: Bread and Wine

• Food preferences, etiquette, and taboos mark social boundaries and identities

- Food taboos can mark religious identification

1. Not eating during Ramadan (Muslism)

2. Kashut - separating meat from dairy products (Jewish)

3. Vegetarianism (Jain)

4. Avoiding beef (Hindu)

• Eating practices may mark gender differences, ethnic or regional differences, and professional or class status.

• Food Democracy: “the ability for all citizens to have secure access to culturally appropriate, sustainable, and healthy food.”

  • Environmentally sustainable food system

  • Economically viable food system

  • Socially just food system

  • Equal representation of “all the voices of the food system”

  • Opportunity for all stakeholders to participate in shaping the food system

• Food Activism

• Foodways

Counihan’s questions:

• Does gender matter in food activism?

• Can studiyng gender reveal…

Sidney Mintz

• “Inside meanings” - emotional, personal, culturally dependent

• “Outside meanings” - created by corporations, governments, mass media for purposes of profit/power

Who controls “outside meanings” in the food sector?

• Men have often dominated politics, whereas women often have dominated feeding practices.

• Kitchen table ethnography - method of interviewing people - while sitting at their table (I think)

Gender Dynamics of food

• Women often are more emotionally connected to food

  • Food as “comfort, crutch, and psychological support”

• Women more commonly than men practice “private self-directed food behaviors”

  • Limiting food intake, overeating

• Gendered cultural roles surrounding food

  • Women: Expectation of cooking, feeding (“unpaid domestic food preparers”)

  • Men:

Focusing on food can illuminate gendered cultural dynamics in the public sphere (food activism) as well as in the private…

Why study food in this context?

• Food provides “a window into Hispanic female identity and relationships in the San Luis Valley of Colorado”

• Recording the food-centered life stories of women…

Food as a window into culture

• Cuisine in Antonito, CO

  • Restaurants: the mix of Anglo and Colorado Mexican cuisine

  • Home-cooking - strong Mexican influence, affected by cold, dry climate

• Food practices

  • Sharing food-related chores and recipes was a way for women to create and maintain relationships with family members and others

  • Eating together was another way to create…

• Food and Class relations

  • Not eating together marked class differences and borders

  • Class subordination was expressed through making food for others but not eating with them

• Food and Gender

  • “The cultural assumption that women serve and defer to men by feeding them became a means of reinforcing gender inequality”

  • Bernadette’s first husband told her to make food a certain way and threw it against the wall when he didn’t like it

    • “Food was Bernadette’s voice, and her husband tried to silence her by controlling her cooking”

  • Bernadette felt the need to cook for her second husband when she was ill

    • “Feeding was a different source of oppression (...) the reciprocity essential to gender inequality was missing”

• What else can we learn about culture by thinking about food and gender?

  • Food Advertising

    • What messages are being communicated through these ads?

    • Are certain foods advertised to attract different age groups, genders, ethnic groups? How do you know?

    • Do these ads suggest a certain lifestyle or health benefit? What cultural ideologies are they appealing to and reinforcing?

    • What gender ideologies are they drawing on?

    • Are these ads successful at convincing you to buy/eat the products?

• Heldke

  • “Culture food colonialism” - the practice of members of economically dominant cultures co-opting foods from economically dominated cultures

    • Similar to “the attitude of various 19th and early 20th centure European painters, anthropologists, and explorers who set out in search of ever ‘newer’, ever more ‘remote’ cultures they could co-opt, borrow from freely and out of context, and use as the raw materials for their own efforts at creation and discovery.”

  • Where might cultural food colonialism appear?

    • Cookbooks, restaurant reviews, the act of dining in “ethnic” restaurants

  • How does cultural food colonialism work in these contexts?

    • The cookbooks/reviews/dining experiences “speak to the food adventurer’s never-ending quest for novel eating experiences - where novelty is also read as exoticism…”

    • …

  • Is there a solution?

    • According to Heldke, we “must learn how to engage with cuisines, cooks, and eaters from cultures other than our own - not as resources but as conservation partners”

    • What might this look like in practice?

WEEK 11: RELIGION

4/1/2024

What is Religion?

• Difficult to Define

  • Not a universally recognized idea

    • Many societies don’t make a distinction between “religious” practices/beliefs and ordinary daily life

  • Huge differences between emic and etic understandings

  • No single set of theories/vocabulary can account for all religious diversity in the world

• Anthropologists’ role is not to determine which religious (or non-religious_ beliefs are right/wrong (morally or otherwise) but to understand the diversity of worldviews…

• Edward Burnett Tylor (1871)

  • Religion as hierarchical classification system for societies

  • Evolution from animism to polytheism to monotheism

  • Animism: humans cultivating relationships of obligation with more powerful beings that reside in the world around us; a belief in souls (human souls, souls in nonhuman nature - mountains, rivers, trees)

  • Polytheism: religious systems that recognize several gods

  • Monotheism: religious systems that recognize a single supreme God.

• Emile Durkheim (1912) - father of sociology

  • Religion as a system of beliefs and practices in relation to sacred things and that unites people into a community.

  • Sacred - things set apart from the ordinary, treated with respect/care and/or are forbidden

  • Profane - things that are ordinary, can be treated with disregard.

  • Is there a distinction between sacred and profane? Answer: No always.

  • Community - it doesn’t account the religion you placed.

• Bronislaw Malinowski (1931)

  • Religion as a remedy for psychological needs

  • Religious rituals as a way to reduce/control anxiety in situations in which one has little control

• Anthony F.C. Wallace (1996)

  • Religion as a belief in the supernatural

  • Wallace’s definition became standard for anthropologists at the time because it offered a culturally relative explanation for rituals: religious rituals made sense only when viewed in the context of religious beliefs.

  • However, it did not offer an explanation for how/ why ideas/ practices change, or how these changes affect people’s lives, or why religious beliefs matter deeply to people.

• Clifford Geertz (1966):

  • Religion as:

1. “A system of symbols

2. Which act to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in mean

3. By formulating conceptions of a general order of existence

4. And clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality

5. That the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistics.”

What are some good and bad things about this definition? - Think about this

What are some of the limitations about this definition? - Think about this

It doesn’t account for behavior or social behaviors. It’s symbolic but it doesn’t talk about people actually doing stuff.

• Perspectives definition: “the means by which human society and culture is extended to include the nonhumans”

• Is this an adequate definition? If not, what is it missing ?

• “A symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life that lreate to ultimate issues of humankind’s existence”

• This definition, according to Welsh and Vivanco, implies:

1. “The existence of things more powerful than human beings.” Religion is a worldview “that situates the plaace of human beings in the universe”

2. Beliefs and behaviors that support the existence of things more powerful than humans

3. Symbols that make the beliefs and behaviors feel intense and real

4. Social settings in which people share powerful experiences of these symbols

• Elements of Religion

  • Cosmology: an explanation for the origin of the universe and the nature of reality

  • Belief in the supernatural: a realm beyond direct human experience

  • Rules governing behaviors: what’s acceptable, what’s punishable, supernatural consequences for misbehavior

  • Ritual: practices, ceremonies that serve a religious purpose; often are supervised or conducted by religious specialists

  • Rites of Passage

1. Theory developed by Arnold Van Gennep (1909)

2. Ceremony of an individual’s transition between life stages or from one status to another

   1. Examples In American culture: graduations, weddings, funerals

3. 3 parts

• Separation: I am no longer a student, final papers, put the cap and gown on, you’re seated with other students

• Liminality (In between stage): Lots of speeches, waiting to become an alumni

  • Communitas (Victor Turner 1969)

• Incorporation: becoming alumni

• Collective Effervescence

  • Concepted developed by Durkheim

  • An energy that people can experience when engaging in religious rituals as part of a crowd of people

    • Involves people participating in the same actions at the same time, sharing similar emotions

WEEK 12: ECONOMY AND WORK

4/08/2024

Economic Anthropology

• “Study of livelihoods: how humans

Economic Anthropology vs. Economics

• Economics: focus on market exchanges (production, distribution, and exchange based on supply, demand, and price) and individual decision making.

• Economic Anthropology: focus on economic activity in multiple arenas

Economic Anthropology

• “Study of livelihoods: how humans work to obtain the material necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter that sustain our lives.”

  • Looks at how people produce, exchange, and consume things

  • Looks at the role of labor, services, and knowledge

Economic Anthropology vs. Economics

• Decision Making

  • Economics: humans make decisions based on rationality and self-interest.

  • Anthropology: humans make decisions on social, culture, political, and institutional factors.

• Economics - a normative approach

  • Theorizes how people should act

    • Based on assumptions that people know what they want, that economic choices reflect what they want, that what they want is defined by culture

• Economic Anthropology - a descriptive approach

  • Analyzes what people actually do and why they do it

    • Does not assume that people are free to act on personal desires, or that people necessarily know what they want

• Concerned with moral economy - processes through which customs, cultural values, beliefs, social pressure influence economic behavior

• Understand the economy to be “a symbolic reflection of the cultural order and the sense of right and wrong that people adhere to within that cultural order”

  • Economic behavior is understood to be “a unique cultural practice”

3 Phases of Economic Activity

• Production:

  • transforming raw materials into material goods for human use

• Exchange:

  • Distributing these goods among people

• Consumption

  • How these goods are used

Modes of Production

• “The social relations through which human labor is used to transform energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge”

• 3 Modes of Production have been used in human history (Eric Wolf)

  • Domestic

    • Work organized by family relations

  • Tributary

    • Production is regulated through political, religious, or military forces

    • Producers pay tribute (material goods, labor) to this political/religious, military force

  • Capitalist

    • Private property owned by members of the capitalist class

    • Working class works for the capitalist class

    • Surpluses of wealth are produced and either kept as profit or reinvested in production to make more surplus wealth

Modes of Production: Domestic

• Foragers, small-scale subsistence farmers

  • Produce food for own consumption (not to sell)

• Labor organized by kinship relations

  • Example (indigenous groups in Central America): men in the family clear fields, all family members plant corn seeds, children protect planted seeds, men harvest corn, mothers and daughters dry and grind corn

  • Kinship determined by culture (not necessarily biology)

• Means of production (resources used to produce goods) are owned collectly

• Lower rates of social domination

• Resources are shared with family groups and distributed more widely to extended family members as needed

• More egalitarian than other modes of production

Modes of Production: Tributary

• Societies organized by the ruler & subjects

• Subjects (farmers, herders) produce for own consumption but also give some of what they produce ( goods, labor) to rules as tribute

• Units of production: communities organized around kinship

• Collected tribute is used by the ruling class (not exchanged/reinvested)

• Often characterized by conflict between producers and rulers

• Production is controlled politically (not directly)

Modes of Production: Capitalist

• Originated in 17th-18th centuries with industrial revolution (North American, western Europe)

• Economic system based on private property owned by a capitalist class

  • Workers usually do not own their means of productions (resources used to produce goods) - unlike domestic/tributary modes of production

  • Workers sell their labor to those who own the means of production (the land they farm, the factories they work in, the businesses they work for)

  • Capitalists sell the products of the workers’ labor for more than it costs to produce these products (cost of labor + materials)

    • This generates surplus wealth for those who own the means of productions

4/10/2024

Modes of Production

• In practice: lots of overlap

• Largest group of people in the world today are small-scale semi-subsistence farmers

  • Use their own labor to grow food for their families, but also produce food for sale (commodities)

  • Example: indigenous Tz’utujil Maya farmers in Guatemala produce maize for subsistence through a domestic (kin-organized) mode of production while also producing coffee as a commodity for capitalist global markets.

Informal Economy

• Diverse activities that are unregulated and untaxed by the state

  • Examples: street vendors in Mexico City, secondhand clothing sellers in Zambia, American teenagers who babysit their neighbors’ children

Solutions to capitalist inequalities?

• Fair trade

  • Partnership between small farmers and buyers

  • Combats poverty among farmers/workers by:

    • Establishing minimum price for products (e.g. coffee, chocolate)

    • Providing stable prices and a fair-trade premium

    • Providing clear contracts, pre-payments, access to financing, access to markets

    • Promoting better working conditions

Modes of Exchange

• Ways of distributing goods based on economic and social relations

• 3 types:

  • Market Exchange (focus of the field of economics)

  • Reciprocity

  • Redistribution

Modes of exchange: market exchange

• A form of trade that involves general purpose money, bargaining, and prices determined by supply and demand

• Need institutions to govern exchanges

• Based on transactions - changes in the status of a good/service

  • Atomized transactions: impersonal, between people with no relationship

  • Personalized transactions: between people with longer lasting relationships

Modes of exchange: reciprocity

• A form of trade that involves the exchange of goods and services; rooted in a mutual sense of obligation

Marcel Mauss

In The Gift (1924), Mauss compared gift exchange in non-Western societies.

• Theorized that giving and receiving gifts creates and maintains social connections and group solidarity

• Societal obligations to give, receive and appropriately reciprocate temper individual self-interest

Marshall Sahlins (1972) - 3 types of reciprocity

• Generalized reciprocity: giving gifts without thinking about its exact value or expecting the equivalent to be returned.

  • Occurs frequently within closest social relationships ( parents-children; spouses) and on occasion among friends, neighbors, community members

• Balanced reciprocity: giving gifts with the expectation that something equivant will be reciprocated

  • Occurs among people who know each other but don’t have close social relationships

• Negative reciprocity: attempts to get something for nothing

Modes of exchange: redistribution

• A form of trade in which a centralized authority collects economic contributions from the whole community and then gives them back in the form of goods and services

• Requires centralized social organization

• Example: United States collection of taxes

Money

• Money is not a universal measure of value

  • Sociocultural relationships and processes play a primary role in creating value; economic systems cannot be considered independently of culture

• Money is symbolic and political

  • “Money shapes economic relations by creating inequalities and obliterating qualitative differences”

• Money is used as:

  • A medium of exchange

  • A toll for storing wealth

  • A way to assign interchangeable values

• Because it makes all sorts of products and services comparable in terms of single metric, money reflects our ideas about the interchangeability of things

Consumption

• Behaviors that connect economic activities with meaningful cultural symbols

  • The process of buying, eating, or using goods/services

• Helps us differentiate between people and between occasions

  • The stuff we buy, eat, and use is different in different contexts

What is the Point of Owning Things?

• Owning something is not simply a matter of individual possession or occupation of an object or piece of hand but rather a matter of interactions between people

• Ownership also involves declarations and claims that are rooted in culturally specific forms of symbolic communication

Appropriation

Consumption begins with appropriation: the process of taking possession of an object, idea, or relationship

• To appropriate a phone, one must have money, so possessing a certain type of phone automatically identifies something about your socioeconomic status.

• Consumption continues with how you modify, decorate, and use the phone

  • Through which you recreate/change cultural meanings and social relationships

4/12/2024

Kwon (2016) “Occuptation”

• Daewoo workers experienced many physical ailments after being laid off. Kwon’s analysis:

  • While working, they experienced a “bodily attunement to the rhythms and rigors of work, from the physical exertion required of the line to the tempo of day-to-day working life. Being laid off, therefore, brought on a forceful involuntary dis-articulation, or in their words, being ‘severed’”

  • “Their physical pains and dysfunctions indexed what may be understood as a process of bodily disassembly resulting in a state of disrepair.”

• Occupation: “embodied habitation” - inhabiting a place and creating a relationship between oneself and the place.

  • “A product of articulating with, attaching to, and thereby inhabiting and being inhabited by particular places and practices.

If we think of a work/a job as an “occupation” in Kwon’s sense, what might we learn about the significance of our occupations?

• Just as the cars in the factory were being constructed through the labor of the workers’ bodies, the workers’ bodies were being constructed through the factory.

  • “Their particular bodies were formed and obtained value by their sustained connection to their coworkers, tools, and objects of labor in the factory.”

• Analysis of male laid-off Daewoo Motor production workers in South Korea

• Because workers’ bodies are formed in a particular way through their work, when they become unemployed it is reflected in their bodes

Employment: an embodied experience

• Our bodies are shaped through the kinds of work we do

Political Economy

• Approach that contextualizes economic relations within state structures, political processes, social structures, cultural values

• “Political economies constrain people’s choices and define the terms by which we must live”

  • How much agency a person has depends on structural factors beyond the individual’s control

  • Sometimes, people’s choices are so constrained that they cannot meet their basic needs and are at a higher risk for suffering - this is referred to as structural violence.

WEEK 13: TECHNOLOGY

4/15/2024

Media

• Technologies that connect people to shared content at the same time

• Media practices: practices oriented toward media

  • Behaviors of people who produce media

  • Behaviors of audiences who interact with media

What do media anthropologists study?

• Mass Communications (i.e. broadcast radio, television)

• Digital media (i.e., internet, streaming, mobile phones)

• How are media designed and/or used by specific communities or cultural groups?

What makes media possible?

• Mechanical infrastructure: physical apparatuses underlying networks of technology

• Cultural infrastructure: values and beliefs that make it possible for a particular type of network to exist and function

How do media anthropologists study media practices?

• Focus on a particular type of media/technology (radio, television, internet, phones, etc.)

• Focus on a particular community

  • Virtual community

  • Geographical community

• Focus on meaning

  • Meanings intended by media creators, meanings interpreted by media consumers

  • Meanings conveyed by different types of media

• Focus on how people in different cultures consume media

Media Ideologies

• “A set of beliefs about communicative technologies with which users and designers explain perceived media structure and meaning”

  • “What people think about the media they use will shape the way they use media”

• Do you share media ideologies with people you communicate with regularly? With others in this class?

• Rank the following communicative technologies from least formal to most formal:

  • Email, Facebook message, text message, phone call, direct message on Instagram, direct message on TikTok, written (mailed) letter, communication via Snapchat, UNM Canvas message.

• “Media Ideologies about one medium are always affected by the media ideologies people have about other media.”

• How you think about texting is linked to how you think about…”

Anthrolopogy of mediation

• Study of how images, speech, people, things become socially significant through being communicated

4/17/2024

Why We Post: Findings of the Project (2016)

1. Social Media is not making us more individualistic, isolated, or narcissistic.

   1. Instead social media often is used to reinforce group membership

      1. In Chile, it can help miners stay connected to their families who live far away.

      2. In Italy, posting selfies expresses community values and social expectations of “looking good”

      3. In Turkey, social media lets people connect through private messaging - developing new relationships and maintaining relationships between people separated by migration

      4. In China, participating in social media is a group activity - young people share access to phones and computers and share account passwords with close friends.

4/19/2024

Why We Post: Findings of the Project (2016)

4. Equality online might not affect inequality offline.

• Marginalized populations, equal to others online, often still experience social exclusion and/or oppression online

5. Users, not developers, create meaning.

• Those who use social media platforms determine how they are used and what their communicate significance might be.

6. Public - facing social media platforms (i.e. Facebook Timelines) tend to maintain the status quo; more private social media (i.e., Whatsapp) may be used to facilitate social change

• On public-facing platforms, people tend to post content that will be approved of by others

• More radical or illicit content appears in more private social media

7. Social media has shifted human communication towards the visual.

• Text and voice have become less central; photos/emojis can be the center of a conservation

• This makes it possible for those who are illiterate to use social media

8. Social media has not erased cultural differences.

• Instead, it is a new way to express cultural differences

• Social media is often used in different ways to serve local purposes

9. Social media helps some, but not all, types of commerce

• Particularly helpful for commerce that relies on personal relationships (peeer-to-peer selling)

10. Social media has created a new kind of space for groups between private and public

• Previously, communication mostly happened either privately (person-to-person letters, phone calls) or publicly (radio, TV, newspaper)

• Social media allows for communication between various sizes of audience and degrees of privacy

11. People see social media as a “place they live”

• A place where we spend our time

• Lets people feel close to friends/family members living far away

• In some cases, romantic relationships before marriage may exist mostly online

12. Social media has changed gender relations

• Especially relevant in highly conservative societies where men and women have limited contact offline, or where it is dangerous to express sexual orientations outside of normative heterosexual relationships

  • A means for young men and women to be in contact with one another

  • Allows people to express non-normative gender ideologies, sexual orientations

  • They are able to do this through the use of fake accounts

13. The significance of each social media platform makes sense only in relation to other social media platforms

• Most people use a range of social media platforms

  • “Polymedia”

• Instagram gets its social meaning because we compare it to Tiktok, and to Twitter/X, and to Snapchat, and to Reddit, etc.

• We have media ideologies - we are judged and judge others based on which media or platform we choose to use

  • Our choice of media/platform has become a social and moral issue

14. Memes are used to morally police online life.

• Memes can be serious (religious messages) or humorous (parody, jokes)

• In either case, memes “assert one set of values and criticize others”

WEEK 14: GLOBALIZATION

4/22/2024

Globalization

• Global circulation of goods, ideas, and people is not new

• What is distinct about contemporary globalization is how fast goods, ideas, and people move around the world

• Definition of globalization (Manfred Steger): “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Perspectives p.305)

When did contemporary globalization begin?

• Bretton Woods Conference (conclusion of World War ll)

  • July 1944: delegates from 44 countries met to establish new rules for the international monetary system

• Created the Internation Monetary Fund (IMF)

  • Would maintain a fixed exchange rate system based on gold and the U.S. dollar

  • Would contribute to the expansion of world trade by providing loans to countries in the short term and adjusting their exchange rates as necessary in the long term

• Also created the Internation Bank for Reconstruction and Development

  • Would finance economic development in less “developed” countries

  • Would finance post-WWll reconstruction of countries

Globalization & Global Inequalities

• Implicit in the foundation of globalization is a distinction between “developed” and “developing” countries

  • Terms created by IMF and World Bank in 1960s to determine global transfer of resources (from rich to poor countries)

  • Based on each country’s per capita income, value of exports, value of goods/services produced, industrialization, infrastructure, standard of living

  • How to classify countries as developed/developing is debated.

Other Classification Terms

Potential Issues:

• The idea of ‘the Other’ Othering other countries and saying we’re better.

• Who decides what the core is?

• What counts as advanced or emerging?

• Monetary purposes/ on advanced vs emerging.

• Creating a hierarchy

• The advanced or emerging economies reach their full potential, while emerging countries need assistance.

• Not geographically accurate

• It’s creating a racial divide instead of an economic/geographical divide.

World Systems Theory

• Academic theory that divides the world into a dominant “core” and dependent “periphery”

  • Core countries develop their economics at the expense of periphery countries

  • Periphery countries provide labor and raw materials for the core’s consumption, resulting in the periphery’s poverty, underdevelopment, and dependency on the core

  • Problem: conceives of periphery as passive victims with no agency

    • People in the periphery can accept, negotiate, resist, rebel against, protest, oppose their role in this system

Isues with classifying countries/people

• Creates a false hierarchy

  • Ignores how some become “high skill”/”high income”/”resource rich” and how others become “low income/skill”/”resource limited” in the first place

    • Colonization and exploitation

• Ascribes a higher value to some lives

  • Reinforces a sense of superiority among those classified as developed/ First World / advanced

  • Knowledge and resources flow from North to South

• Allows some groups to exploit/subjugate others

  • Even in the aid industry/NGOs

    • “Beneficiaries are those beholden to the priorities and conditions of aid institutions while donors/providers are perceived as white saviors”

    • E.g. global COVID-19 pandemic response: inequitable vaccine donations; power dynamics prevented more countries from manufacturing medicines/ vaccines

Alternatives to these terms?

• Focus on geographical and cultural distinctions

  • E.g., 5 regions of Africa (West, East, North, Southern and Central), distinct Caribbean states, Central and South America

• Specify how/why someplace is low-resource

  • (financial, knowledge infrastructure, human resources, physical infrastructure, service delivery, geography…)

• Use income as a source of distinction - with more than 2 categories

  • Instead of ambiguous terms with racist connotations

• Let people determine how they should described & their own standards of health/development.

Anthropology and Development

What is the goal of development?

4/24/2024

Anthropology and Development

• What is the goal of development?

  • To improve material conditions while maintaining diversity?

  • To eliminate diversity and make everyone the same?

Development Anthropology

• Development anthropologists guide development projects in ways that are beneficial both for local people and outside agencies.

  • Example: 1970s-80s project in Haiti to reduce deforestation

    • Anthropologist Gerald Murray bridged the gap between planners’ goals and farmers’ goals, suggesting mutually beneficial solutions.

Anthropology of Development

• Soome anthropologists support the work of development anthropology by exploring what kinds of social conditions might help projects succeed.

• Others challenge that development inevitably causes harm by giving more control to outsiders, worsening social inequality, and perpetuating the ethnocentric, and paternalistic attitudes of the colonial era.

Discussion

• Are anthropologists ethically obligated to help communities develop if members of the community want their help?

5 dimensions of global cultural flow (Appadurai)

Global Scapes

1. Ethnoscapes: movements of people

2. Ideoscapes: movements of belief systems

3. Mediascapes: movements to representational & communicative practices

4. Technoscapes: movements of technologies

5. Financescapes: movements of capital

Ethnoscape

The flow of people across boundaries

• Labor migrants

  • Immigrants

  • Reguees, exiles

  • Lesiure travelers/tourists

Technoscape

• Flows of technoscape

  • “As the pace of technological innovation increases, so does the flow of technology.”

• Cell phones, the internet, email, and social media allow rapid and frequent communication between any two parts of the world

  • However, not everyone has access

    • Only 1 in 5000 people in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) has computer access

  • Wealth and poverty play large roles in a person’s ability to participate in global communcation

Ideoscape

• Via social media

• Via religious missionaries

Financescape

• Flow of money across political borders

• Financial globalization begin in the 1870s

  • Accelerated over the last 70 years

  • Many transnational corporations have “set up shop” in countries with low hourly wages and/or lax environmental regulations

    • This has allowed them to accumulate vast amounts of wealth (capital)

Mediascape

Flow of media across borders

Traveling T-shirts

• “Planet Monday Makes A T-shirt.” (Insert video played in the class)

• Which of Appadurai’s scapes are involved in the production of a t-shirt?

4/26/2024

2 Theories

• Cultural convergence

• Hybridization

Cultural Convergence Theories

• Local traditions are gradually fading as Western ideas replace those in non-Western societies (Ernest Gellner 1983)

• The “McDonaldization” model

  • Characteristics of fast food restaurants (and American society) are spreading throughout the world

    • Efficiency, calculability, predictability, tight control over production, mechanized labor over human labor

  • “Coca-Colonization” (Westernization, Americanization, or cultural imperialism)

    • Cultural and Economic imposition of Western products/beliefs on the rest of the world

• Critiques of the theory

  • Shared foods, entertainment, clothing do not necessarily mean that humans are culturally homogenous in other ways

  • Convergence theories equate material goods (what people consume) with cultural and personal identity

Hybridization Theory

• Idea that the world’s cultures are mixing, creating persistent cultural diversity

• Critiques of the theory:

  • Cultural mixing might be happening at surface-level while what’s actually happening is convergence

  • Ignores political power, economic power, inequality

Glocalization

• Local adaptations of globally circulating ideas or products

• Effects on Identity

  • Wider variety of goods available to purchase -> wider variety of identities to index through buying habits

  • But this is limited by social class

    • High prices of globally traded commodities

Globalization: pluses and minuses

• The positive:

  • Mediascape: People are increasingly aware of (and can help to address) injustices, natural disasters, and other crises in other parts of the world

  • Financescape: Crowd-source fundraising can get money to people in need in distant places

• The negative:

  • Ethnoscape: Globalization has caused some of the far-away crises people are increasingly aware of (epidemics, refugee crises)

  • Mediascape: increased reach of hate speech

  • Financescape: Wealthier countries to continue to extract wealth from poorer countries

• Promoters of globalization emphasize unprecedented prosperity, economic growth (the “winners”)

• Opponents of globalization emphasize poverty, widening gap between rich and poor (the “losers”)

• Anthropological analyses og globalization look at cultural nuances rather than debating whether it’s good/bad

  • Inequalities that have developed, what happens when peoples confront one another, effects of domination, how people accommodate, and/or resist globalization, how people express local identities through interactions with the transnational

Discussion

• Who should define who is a “winner” or “loser” in the process of globalization? What kinds of criteria (financial, social, political…) should be used?

Why do Anthropologists Study Globalization?

• 1950s - Marxist anthropologists (e.g., Eric Wolf) argued that we need to understand how societies fit into the global capitalist system to understand non-Western societies

  • Too narrow of a focus gives incomplete understandings of underlying causes of cultural differences and realities of people’s lives

How do Anthropologists study Globalization?

• Focus on how it affects specific contexts

  • Lived experiences, change over time, benefits and costs

• Syncretism (combining different belief systems)

  • How people combine the local with the global

• Transnationalism (events that cross nation-state borders)

  • How people’s lives are affected by transnational flows/events

• Multi-sited ethnography

  • Studying a topic/issue in multiple geographic field sites

Traveling T-Shirt

• “Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt.” (Inserts the video)

• Which of Appadurai’s scapes are involved in the production of a t-shirt?

Globalized Food

• Where does the food we eat come from?

• How does globalization affect which people have access to which foods?

• In our globalized world, what does the food we eat say about our social positionality?

WEEK 15: APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY

4/29/2024

What is applied anthropology?

• Idea that “applied” anthropology is separate from “academic” anthropology

  • Academic: focus on theory

  • Applied: focus on practical problem solving

• Based on an ideological separation between knowledge and action

Where did applied anthropology come from?

• United Kingdom: British colonial system (late 1800s - early 1900s)

  • Cultural research to help colonial administrators maintain effective control through “indirect rule”

    • Focused on understanding local land tenure systems, tribal authority, customary law

• United States: emerged in 3 separate contexts

  • Working with Native American reservation administrators (1930s)

  • Harvard Business School: industrial organization research (early 1900s)

  • Research on rural communities (1920s-30s)

Ethical Issues

• During World War ll, some American anthropologists ‘applied’ anthropology in ways that directly harmed local populations

  • In the Pacific islands: facilitating local cooperation with occupying US forces

  • In the US: contributing to internment of Japanese Americans

• As a result, many ‘academic’ anthropologists distanced themselves from applied anthropology

  • Became less involved in wider social issues

  • Focus more on strictly theoretical research

• Is applied anthropology inherently biased toward the organizations/companies sponsoring it?

• Can it privilege the perspectives of the powerless if it is intended to help commercial or military interests?

• Is it actually effective in influencing policies and practices?

Is the applied vs. academic dichotomy real?

• All anthropologists both think theoretically and apply their knowledge in some way

• All anthropogists are part of society

• All anthropogists are changing society in some way through what they write

• “Applied and basic research do not represent separate scholarly positions or divergent intellectual stances; they reflect different jobs done by anthropogists.”

• But “most anthropogists have been ‘engaged’ and ‘public’ in intention - and thus, in a general sense, applied”

  • Les W. Field and Richard G. Fox (2007), Anthropology Put to Work, p.4

What Do Applied Anthropogists do?

• 4 main roles (Firth 1981)

  • Client-oriented research

  • Mediation

  • Influence public opinion / public policy

  • Provide assistance

• 14 roles (van Willigen 1993)

  • Policy researcher

  • Evaluator

  • Impact assessor

  • Needs assessor

  • Planner

  • Research Analyst

  • Advocate

  • Trainer

  • Culture Broker

  • Expert witness

  • Public participation specialist

  • Administrator/manageer

  • Change agent

  • Therapist

• In the field of development work

  • ‘development’ : accomplished through a series of projects (e.g., large-scale infrastructure work, like building dams or bridges; health-related; educational activities)

  • Projects

    • Framed as rational plans for economic and social change

    • Top-down design: crafted by international development donors, little consultation with local communities

    • Time-bound structures for intervention involving a series of staged activities: identification → implementation → completion → evaluation

    • HOWEVER: real people behave in complex ways and projects don’t necessarily account for social issues

    • 1980s: Anthropogists were hired to research effects of projects on local populations, though these project jobs are less common today

  • Advocacy

    • Anthropologists speak out on the interests of local groups

    • Anthropologists as mediator/”go-between” between developers and people ‘being developed’

    • Today: anthropologists as supporters rather than spokespeople

Critiques of Applied Anthroplogy

1. Quality

   1. Research for companies requires narrow timeframes, quick recommendations

      1. Oversimplified findings, compromised research quality

2. Objectivity

   1. Research for companies/governments might simply support company/government policies

3. Ethical Integrity

   1. Does researching a population for the benefit of a company/government cause harm to that population? Are their own interests taken into consideration?

4. Opportunism

   1. Idea that applied anthropogists profit from anthropological theory but don’t contribute to it.

Alternatives to the applied vs. academic dichotomy?

• Action Anthropology (Sol Tax)

  • Activist approach

  • Simultaneous pursuit of (theortical) knowledge and responsibility to a community

  • “Help a group of people to solve a problem, and…learn something in process” (Garner & Lewis 2015 p.57)

  • Research findings should be both for academics and for the community being studied

• Activist Research (Charles Hale 2006)

  • Openly align with a group of people engaged in political struggle

  • Merge academic and political commitments

• Protest anthropology

  • Beyond alignment with protest movements - full participation in them

• Public anthropology

  • Not a subfield, but a way of sharing anthropological insights

  • Writing for a broad audience (not just other anthropologists)

  • Deal with social issues that are relevant to academic debates but also to a broader public

5/1/2024

REVIEW DAY:

1. Rite of Passage: Something that helps translate from one phase of life to another. Very common in religions and other stuff. Mark transitions from one social status to another, etc. Example: Wedding Ceremonies and Graduations.

2. What are the indigenous relationships to nature and how have these relationships been perceived? : The idea of noble savage, advertisements about pollution and litering, an Italian pretending to be indigenous, and something about these indigenous people and the Brazilian government. The relationship of give and take vs the industrial angle: forcing it to be something it’s not. Different perspectives about wilderness. Anthropogenic: lands shaped by human interactions. There is a myth of the noble savage, where idingeous people have a special connection with nature. In reality, Indigenous are wanting their lands to live, etc.