Culture Concept and Anthropology: Study Notes
Culture Concept and Anthropology: Study Notes
Learning objectives (overview)
Compare and contrast ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
Describe the role that early anthropologists Sir James Frazer and Sir E. B. Tylor played in defining the concept of culture in anthropology.
Identify differences between armchair anthropology and participant-observer fieldwork; explain how Bronislaw Malinowski contributed to fieldwork techniques.
Identify contributions Franz Boas and his students made to new theories about culture.
Assess ethical issues that can arise from anthropological research.
Stories and the study of culture: Gulliver’s Travels and the Other
Stories are a universal cultural form: fables, tall tales, folktales, oral traditions.
Purposes of stories:
Entertainment, moral instruction, preserving customs, communicating problems, and shaping social behavior.
Stories serve as cultural preservation and as a form of social control; they validate traditions and influence norms.
The Other:
The Other describes people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are seen as different from one’s own.
Gulliver’s Travels serves as a narrative example of the Other: Gulliver (a European) is seen as an outsider by the Lilliputians and vice versa.
Perspectives matter: Gulliver sees the Lilliputians as the Other; they see him as a strange giant—mutual Othering.
Key takeaways about culture through storytelling:
Stories reveal cultural differences and conflicts, as well as common human themes (battle between good and evil, the quest).
Storytelling helps explain norms, language, and social relations; it can transmit cultural values to the next generation.
Anthropologists as storytellers: from armchair to fieldwork
Armchair anthropology (late 19th–early 20th century):
Based on second-hand reports from missionaries, officials, or travelers; no direct field contact.
Ethnocentrism: viewing others through the researcher’s own cultural lens; often implying superiority of the researcher’s culture.
Often involved speculative generalizations about whole cultures without empirical field data.
Early foundational figures and definitions:
Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough; later A Study in Magic and Religion, 1890s): described magical and religious beliefs across cultures but relied on others’ accounts rather than fieldwork.
Sir E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871): defined culture as a broad complex including various human capabilities and habits.
Tylor’s definition:
Key contrast: armchair vs fieldwork laid groundwork for epistemic shifts in anthropology.
From armchair to fieldwork: Malinowski and the off-the-veranda approach
Bronislaw Malinowski (Polish, early 20th century) moved anthropology into field settings.
Off the veranda approach: active participant-observation; living among people; direct life observation.
Wrote The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and related ethnographies, part of a Trobriand Islands trilogy.
Went native to an extent: integrated with community, taking leadership roles, participating in daily life, and even marriages/rituals.
Malinowski’s core insight: grasp the native’s point of view and relations to life to understand their worldview. He urged seeing through the natives’ eyes to understand meaning and function within their culture.
Ethical tensions: going native raises questions about bias, objectivity, and potential harm or boundary violations.
Divergent developmental paths: European functionalism and American cultural relativism
The development of theories of culture differed across Europe and North America.
Europe: functionalism and structural-functionalism
Functionalism emphasizes how social institutions and practices contribute to social order and cohesion.
Bronislaw Malinowski highlighted that cultural traditions arise to meet human needs: food, comfort, safety, knowledge, reproduction, livelihood.
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (British) emphasized the function of social structures (e.g., the family) for maintaining social order across generations.
Goal: show that culture includes practices and institutions, not just beliefs or ideas.
Limitations: early functionalism was criticized for seeing cultures as static and for under-emphasizing change.
United States: cultural relativism and enculturation
The American School emphasized cultural relativism: cultures must be understood on their own terms, not by outsider standards.
Enculturation: the process by which individuals learn their culture.
Boas and students trained the first generation of American anthropologists and redirected the field away from ethnocentrism and cultural evolutionism.
Key Boasian lineage: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber.
Figures and their contributions:
Ruth Benedict: Patterns of Culture (1934) — culture shapes coherent patterns of thinking and behavior; influences personality traits within a culture.
Margaret Mead: Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; published 1928) — adolescent experiences in Samoa contrasted with the U.S.; argued culture shapes emotions and development; contributed to nature vs nurture debates.
Alfred L. Kroeber: The Nature of Culture (1952); focused on how cultures change and influence one another; language and the transmission of culture per his work on Native American languages; documented diffusion and language’s role in culture.
Clifford Geertz (postmodern symbolic anthropology): The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) — culture is not just inside people’s heads but publically expressed through symbols and meanings; culture is a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms.
The ongoing aim: emphasize holism, context, and the need to understand cultures on their own terms while recognizing interconnectedness with other cultures.
The core concept of culture (definitions and evolution of ideas)
Tylor’s classic definition (see above): culture as learned and shared knowledge, beliefs, practices, etc.
Cultural relativism (Boas and successors): explore cultures with emic (insider) perspectives, resisting external judgments based on one’s own culture.
Enculturation and social learning: individuals acquire culture through socialization; language, norms, and practices are transmitted across generations.
Holism: attempting to study humans by considering biological, social, historical, environmental, and linguistic dimensions.
Language as a central element: subsequent American anthropologists highlighted language as a carrier of culture; Kroeber documented language’s role; Geertz and symbolic anthropology placed language and symbols at the center of cultural analysis.
Cultural diffusion and change: cultures influence one another; The Nature of Culture and later works trace how cultures transform via contact and diffusion.
The Other and ethnocentrism: continual reminder of perspective and the need to challenge biased assumptions about other cultures.
Ethical issues in anthropological research and guidelines
Post-World War II ethics and formal codes
Nuremberg Code (post-1945): ethical standards for human experimentation and research conduct.
AAA and other associations developed codes of ethics to guide anthropologists; emphasis on responsible conduct in research settings.
Core principles (typical AAA code):
Do no harm.
Be open and honest regarding one’s work.
Obtain informed consent and necessary permissions.
Protect vulnerable populations from competing ethical obligations.
Make results accessible and preserve records.
Maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships.
Case examples and debates:
Malinowski’s diary (A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, 1967): describes loneliness, personal thoughts, sexual fantasies; raises questions about separating personal bias from professional conclusions.
Yanomami controversy (Chagnon and Neel, 1960s–2000s): allegations of harm, measles outbreaks, and ethical concerns about consent and manipulation.
Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado (2000) amplified criticism; AAA investigations led to mixed conclusions (2002 report criticized; 2005 reconsidered; no definitive exoneration or guilty verdict).
These episodes illustrate the ambiguities of truth and the ethical dilemmas in ethnography; they emphasize the need for transparent methods, rigorous ethics, and triangulation of evidence.
Practical implications for researchers:
The necessity of balancing scientific aims with respect for cultural autonomy.
The importance of informed consent, ongoing community engagement, and participant welfare.
The challenge of maintaining objectivity while acknowledging one’s own cultural biases and emotions.
Malinowski and ethical tensions in fieldwork
Malinowski’s diary highlights the tension between professional ethics and personal bias.
Diaries can reveal attitudes and biases that may influence conclusions; but diaries are seldom public, raising questions about how researchers manage private thoughts.
Balancing the pursuit of knowledge with respect for participants requires careful reflection and ethical stewardship.
The Yanomami case and lessons for truth-telling in anthropology
The Yanomami controversy illustrates how theories of violence, health, and cultural life can be misrepresented or misinterpreted.
Inquiries into representation, consent, and harm show that truth in ethnography is complex and contested.
The broader lesson: anthropologists must use a robust toolkit of theory and method to tell truthful stories that honor the voices of the people studied and adhere to ethical standards.
The coffee-shop chapter: globalization, digital culture, and the future of culture study
The coffee-shop vignette invites reflection on culture as lived in everyday spaces and how language, social interactions, and consumer spaces shape cultural identity.
Globalization and digital life: new languages, online cultures, and cross-border interactions raise questions about how to study cyber (digital) culture.
Is digital or cyber anthropology the future? Two possible folds:
Armchair or veranda research in the digital age? A debate about distance vs immersion in online communities.
Cyber spaces enable fieldwork without traveling while also creating new ethical challenges (privacy, representation, consent in virtual environments).
The chapter argues that the culture concept is not a fixed definition but a puzzle with many pieces from diverse voices, including everyday experiences and global interconnections.
Final reflections and personal voices
The authors include reflections from Emily and Priscilla:
Emily: reflects on growing up among Inuit and the ongoing negotiation of cultural self and Other; emphasizes shared values across cultures and the importance of cultural awareness.
Priscilla: notes experiences in Kenya and the Portuguese-Canadian family background; highlights storytelling as a way of maintaining tradition, language, indigenous knowledge, and cultural identity.
The closing idea: culture is a puzzle with many pieces; the puzzle is almost complete but not finished, and new domains (e.g., cyberspace) may redefine what we consider culture.
Key terms and glossary (quick reference)
Armchair anthropology: an early and discredited method of anthropological research that did not involve direct contact with the people studied.
Cultural determinism: the idea that behavioral differences are caused by culture rather than biology.
Cultural evolutionism: a discredited 19th-century theory proposing that societies evolve through fixed stages (e.g., savagery, barbarism, civilization).
Cultural relativism: the idea that we should understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture, not our own.
Culture: a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared; together, they form an integrated whole that binds people and shapes worldview and lifeways.
Enculturation: the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group.
Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and the yardstick by which others are measured.
Functionalism: an approach emphasizing how parts of a society work together to support the functioning of the whole.
Going native: becoming fully integrated into a cultural group through leadership, marriage, roles in society, or other immersive actions.
Holism: taking a broad view of historical, environmental, and cultural foundations of behavior.
Kinship: blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.
Participant observation: a method in which the researcher observes while participating in the same activities as informants.
Structural-Functionalism: an approach focusing on how social institutions contribute to social order.
The Other: term for people whose customs or beliefs differ from one’s own, highlighting related themes of perspective and bias.
Notable formulations and definitions (LaTeX-ready)
Tylor’s culture definition:
Boas on cultural relativism (paraphrase): cultures must be understood on their own terms rather than by an outsider’s standard; encoded as a principle of interpretation in ethnography.
Geertz on culture (from The Interpretation of Cultures):
Enculturation and language: central to how individuals acquire culture and how language transmits culture.
Functionalism and Radcliffe-Brown’s view: social institutions function to maintain social order and cohesion; the family as a key unit in many societies.
Connections to broader themes and real-world relevance
Ethnography and fieldwork are central to understanding culture beyond textbooks; direct contact with communities yields richer, more nuanced understandings.
The tension between objectivity and subjectivity is a persistent ethical issue in ethnography; researchers must acknowledge biases and strive for truthful representation.
The debate around cultural relativism vs ethnocentrism informs how researchers design studies, engage with communities, and interpret data.
The diffusion of cultural traits and globalization influence language, identity, and social structures; modern anthropology must account for digital cultures and online communities.
Review prompts (for exam prep)
How do ethnocentrism and cultural relativism differ, and why is this distinction important for ethnographic research?
What were Frazer and Tylor’s contributions to culture, and what are the limitations of armchair anthropology?
How did Malinowski’s fieldwork advance anthropological methods? What does "going native" imply ethically and methodologically?
What is cultural relativism, and how did Boas and his students reshape American anthropology?
What ethical codes govern contemporary anthropology, and how have they evolved since the Nuremberg Code?
How did Geertz redefine culture in symbolic and interpretive terms, and how does this differ from earlier functionalist views?
What controversies surrounded the Yanomami research, and what do they teach about research ethics and truth-telling in anthropology?
In what ways can cyberspace be incorporated into anthropological research, and what new ethical considerations does it raise?
"If you just answered yes [to studying culture in a coffee shop], in a way you were acting as an anthropologist." This work emphasizes that culture is studied not only in distant locations but in everyday spaces, including shared public settings like coffee shops, where language, symbolism, social interaction, and global influences converge to create meaning and shape cultural identities.