anth 202 readings

What does it mean to be an anthropologist?

"comprehension of the self by the detour of the other"- Paul Rabinow using ourselves and subjects as the objects of study about social relations

AAA statement on race

- Race is a recent human invention - Race is about culture, not biology - Race and racism are embedded in institutions and everyday life "Human populations are not ambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups" "Most physical variation, about 94% lies within so-called racial groups and differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within 'racial' groups than between them" "any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations are both arbitrary and subjective" "Physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them" "The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined" "At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language" "It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior"

Sheper-Hughes

-also rejects post modern anthropology -applied anthropologist -anthropology must be ethically grounded but you must suspend moral judgment to put pressure on moral frameworks -speak truth to power -her work in Africa during apartheid and in Brazil shows how power structures create silence and anthropology cannot hide behind this -barefoot anthropology--trying to fight against desensitization of violence and horror -she resolves the anthropological dilemma of ethics by saying that ethics is prior to culture and based on the mother-child relationship--creating bonds across radical otherness "cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live and that anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded" before culture, there is ethics "is precultural to the extent that our human existence as social beings presupposes the presence of other"

Malinowski- Argonauts of the Western Pacific

-brought fieldwork to anthropology -fieldwork involves immersion into native life but also involves a distance -the goal is to capture the complex whole and to understand the coherency that the natives live but probably unconsciously live -there is a structure to culture that informs people how to live and through participant observation they can tell you some of their systems of meanings imponderabilia: stuff you can't weigh yet has a huge weight for the culture--the real substance of the social fabric that holds society together "in ethnography, the writer is his own chronicler and the historian at the same time, while his sources are no doubt easily accessible, but also supremely elusive and complex: they are not embodied in fixed, material documents, but in the behaviour and memory of living men" "the ethnographer has not only to spread his nets in the right place, and wait for what will fall into the. He must be an active huntsman, and drive his quarry into them and follow it up to its most inaccessible lairs" "the consistency, the law and order which obtain within each aspect make also for joining them into one coherent whole" "but these things, though crystallised and set, are nowhere formulated...But not even in human mind or memory are these laws to be found definitely formulated" "There is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality"--imponderabilia "let facts speak for themselves" "we have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him"

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema- Horace Miner

-makes society appear strange even though it is our own society (American) -everything becomes ritual (in this way it mocks anthropology) -takes things we assume is natural, like brushing teeth, and making it an aspect of culture

Thompson-Quit Sniveling Crybaby

An exploration of kinship in the use of emergent IVF technologies On one hand, kinship as natural through descent and genes on other hand, kinship as cultural and the way we see people and relations doesn't necessarily map onto biological terms we naturalize our kinship system but maybe it's actually cultural, like Mead in her adolescent studies new technologies like IVF reveals other possibilities of 'doing kinship', different factors of law, technology etc. in reckoning kin come out what does this mean for kinship? "kin are divided into 'blood relations' and non-blood relations, and it is usually assumed that blood relations simply reflect genetic relationship" "In donor egg in-vitro fertilization, however, the overlapping biological idioms of blood and genes come apart" "This disrupts the coherence of the natural ground for bilateral linear descent and creates a schism between the concepts that seemed to map so perfectly onto one another" "Gestational surrogacy is procedurally identical to donor egg in-vitro fertilization: eggs from one woman are fertilized and gestated in the uterus of another woman" "whereas donor egg IVF traces motherhood through the blood half of this separation, gestational surrogacy traces it through the genetic half" "reveals possibilities for other ways of 'doing' kinship that configure the mixture of nature and culture differently" "For women, conventional surrogacy is apparently harder to accept than donor egg or gestational surrogacy because the designated mother-to-be neither provides the eggs nor gestates the fetus" giovanna used good friend as donor eggs for IVF-->her friend was also Italian American so it was "enough genetic similarity"; she "cast her gestation in biological terms, appealing to blood and shared bodily substance" "what mattered to her in genetic inheritance was that the donor share a similar history to her own" "there is a chain of transactions between the natural and the cultural that not only grounds the cultural in the natural but gives the natural its explanatory power by its links to culturally relevant categories" Paula (african american) donor egg IVF with donor from her community--"In African American communities it was not unusual for women to 'mother' or 'second mother' their sister's or daughter's or friend's children" "suggests the possibility of legitimizing socially shared motherhood through the naturalization of shared motherhood" Flora--egg donor is the daughter of the woman who is trying to get pregnant-->donor daughter is also the genetic mother so "the daughters are biological intermediaries" "they did not seem overly perturbed. Instead they discussed the mother's and daughter's genetic similarity" "The status of the stored embryos did seem to raise anxiety associated with inappropriate kinship" Vanessa as surrogate for random couple--"surprised at the severing of the ties of relationship between herself and the recipient couple after the baby was born and handed over" she was "just like any other instrumental intermediary in establishing the pregnancy" in these cases, the procedures raise a challenge to biological essentialism opaque: "a stage that answers who the mother is" "A stage can be made securely opaque by separating but bringing into coordination the biological and social accounts of the relationship" transparent: "if it enables heredity or relatedness but does not itself thereby get configured in the web of kinship relations" "giovanna stressed the significance of the gestational component of reproduction and emphasized the importance of the experiential aspects of being pregnant and giving birth in designating motherhood" "like giovanna, paula gave an ethnic or racial interpretation to the genes such that by getting genetic African Americanness from her donor the baby would share racial sameness" "the trope that genes code for racial distinctions, inclusions, and exclusions, and purity seemed to be more significant here than the equally prevalent trope that genes function as the thing that provides the definitive mark of individuality which is passed down" "the donor egg procedures seem to offer the potential to somewhat transform biological kinship in the directions indicated, for example, by giovanna when she codes genetics back to socioeconomic factors and thereby de-essentializes genetics, and when she draws on the trop of blood relation and shared bodily substance without genetics" "the bid to make gestation in donor egg procedures opaque vis-a-vis biological kinship would have failed" "Paula was happy to accept that in some ways there was more than one mother. shared mothering was presented as a practice which preserves racial identity and integrity" "The mere fact of establishing a pregnancy does not sort out the chains of kinship by itself; there is a complicated choreography necessary to disambiguate transparent and opaque interventions"

Roy D'andrade

Attempts to ground anthropology into an objective science independent from our subjective understandings rejects post-modern anthropology because they critique science as a product of culture which he rejects morality should not be taken into the fieldwork "anthropology's claim to moral authority rests on knowing the empirical truths about the world and that moral models should be kept separate from objective models because moral models are counterproductive in discovering how the world works"

Forest of Bliss-Robert Gardner

Filmed in Banares Varanasi India on an ancient city on the banks of the Ganges river (oldest inhabited city) about life and death-about the death in life and the life in death

The problem with comparative anthropology

How can we know what is good and bad if everything is culturally constructed? How can you be a moral and ethical person? Is there are moral/ethical realm outside of our culture? Or is everything just moral relativism? Most anthropologists are not moral relativists

Lévi-Strauss- A Writing Lesson

In the Amazon -Amazonian imitating the anthropologist writing--he knew exactly that writing was a tool of power just by imitating writing writing is a bridge from the mind to reality "The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes"--power in writing "although writing may not have been enough to consolidate knowledge, it was perhaps indispensable for the strengthening of dominion" "yet at the same time I could not help admiring their chief's genius in instantly recognizing that writing could increase his authority, thus grasping the basis of the institution without knowing how to use it"

What does the oedipus riddle tell us?

It asks us what it means to be human, a distinctly anthropological question. It asks us what separates ourselves from the other beings in this Earth, and how do we mediate ourselves through this world? The sphinx riddle tells us that we are born and crawl on all 4, yet in the middle of our life we walk on 2 feet, and at the end, on 3 (2 legs and a cane, tells us about what we use to mediate/depend on in the world)

James Agee and Walker Evans, Let US now Praise Famous Men

James Agee-social documentarian, 1940s influential film critic social documentarian is a method of anthropology where you use writing to allow people to see humanity of others to create connections between you and other and motivate people to care "perceive the cruel radiance as it is" pay attention to every detail "For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands" "This effort to suspend or destroy imagination, there opens before consciousness, and within it, a universe luminous, spacious, incalculably rich and wonderful in each detail" "It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist"

Pierpont- The Measure of America

NY Times Article of Franz Boas pre-boas anthropology studied race as a 'natural' classification of humans and was used to justify slavery, colonialism etc. eugenics-the idea of creating and manipulating a superior race by 'guiding evolution'; rejects the idea of a design without a designer boas fought all of this during anti-semitism and scientific racism through context of cultures; relative -evolution threatened people's worldview because there is design without a designer evolution has no end goal, yet it is not goalless--one life form does something for the sake of future generations but there's no ultimate goal boas wanted to study cranial size to prove that there was more variation within races than between and head size was really the result of environment boas was heavily on the nurture side of nature vs. nurture debate "The chief means of establishing the racial order was to measure skulls"-->"elaborate measuring techniques yielded columns of figures that inevitably placed white intelligence at the top of the scale" "he had discovered his professional objective: to study the relation between the life of a people and their physical environment" "the idea of a 'cultured' individual is merely relative" "to understand what an object meant, the viewer must see it as its creators saw it, not in a pattern imposed by outsiders"--on his museum exhibits of native americans argued that "the museum's greatest duty was to demonstrate that our people are not the only carriers of civilization" he found that "skull width in relation to its length ... was so easily altered by extraneous factors and so inconsistently applicable to different groups" measured 18,000 immigrants and their children and found that "the longer the parents had been in this country, the greater the difference, while European-born children of the same families showed no comparable change" Eugenics: "science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race" he "coordinated projects that amounted to a comprehensive attack on the biologically fixated status quo" "the project he gave to Mead had similar implications (as the result of the skulls): the perturbations of puberty, like cranial structure, were accepted as a biological absolute" "Although Boas argued for the recognition of plural cultures, he suggested not that all human achievements were equal, but that the range of intelligence and virtue ran the gamut about equally in every group. Thus each person can be judged only as an individual. The challenge that remained was to demonstrate the power of culture in shaping lives" "Culture was experience raised to scientific status. And it combined with biology to make mankind. Boas sent his students off to learn how the delicate balance worked" "Mead's utopia served as another welcome tool to persuade people of human malleability" "Culture, the community of emotional life that rises from our everyday habits, was more significant than race or origin in building a nation" "So let them argue. Let the anthropologists argue, let the politicians argue, let even the bigots argue. It's a free country-in part thanks to Boas"-->on arguments about the accuracy of his cranial measurements

Comparison between Malinowski and Rabinow's idea of fieldwork

Rabinow fieldwork is not isolated (Morocco has had contact with colonialism), he understands that he is part of colonialism and is aware of the inherent unequal power relations that he can't step out of...for example he knows that he uses colonial structures to get into villages and blackmails people to get them to talk (symbolic violence) -Rabinow takes fieldwork a step further saying it's the struggles within the fieldwork itself that reveal what anthropology really is -for rabinow anthropology is truly a reciprocal relationship of otherness ex. "are you drunk?"

Freud: The Forgetting of Proper Names

This semiotics is attempt to fix mind-body dualism Slips of tongues reveals the associations that work like contagious yawn, one thinking giving rise to another; not random—this register that we think in when we dream is really iconic and indexical "In the course of our efforts to recover the name that has dropped out, other ones-substitute names-enter our consciousness" "This displacement is not left to arbitrary psychical choice but follows paths which can be predicted and which conform to laws" "The names which are substituted are connected in a discoverable way with the missing name" "The disinclination to remember was aimed against one content; the inability to remember emerged in another" the necessary conditions for forgetting a name: 1. a certain disposition to forgetting the name 2. a process of suppression carried out shortly before 3. the possibility of establishing an external association between the name in question and the element previously suppressed--the two elements which are joined by an external association possess some connection of content

The Ax Fight-Asch

about the Adamame people in the amazon Trying to understand what happened in terms of the social analysis of relations (kinship and enemies) -the sense of chaos in uninterpreted experiences -his idea is that the Adamame are similar to our ancestors (us before modernization) and that all of us were originally fierce criticisms: they were actually a relatively peaceful society before Europeans brought axes and machetes so his subjective behavior has affected them, which contradicts his more objective approach -ignores the context of European contact

Robert Hertz- Pre-eminence of the Right Hand

all over the world, people favor the right over the left, reflected in language, religion, art, behaviors etc. the left is seen as threatening to the order shifting of culture and society in terms of power we can explain why most of us are right-handed through biology but biology cannot explain why we favor the right and we see left as threatening -society has a tendency to emphasize these divisions such that they become cultural facts -society naturalizes dominance and submission "organic asymmetry in man is at once a fact and an ideal. Anatomy accounts for the fact to the extent that it results from the structure of the organism; but however strong a determinant one may suppose it to be, it is incapable of explaining the origin of the ideal or the reason for its existence" "The principle by which men are assigned rank and function remains the same: social polarity is still a reflection and a consequence of religious polarity" sacred and profane- left hand is profane-->cosmic distinction rests on a primordial religious antithesis "if organic asymmetry had not existed, it would have had to be invented" "if it is the right hands that are joined in a marriage, oath, etc., it is because it is in man's right side that lie the powers and authority which give weight to the gestures, the force by which it exercises its hold on things" "for it would be the end of man and everything else if the profane were ever allowed to prevail over the sacred and death over life" "The external world, with its light and shade, enriches and gives precision to religious notions which issue from the depths of the collective consciousness; but it does not create them" "it is because man is a double being--homo duplex--that he possesses a right and a left hand that are profoundly differentiated"

Geertz Balinese cockfight

also pandemonium and confusion -geertz wants to understand the visible and public cockfight's meaning, as opposed to the ax fight -cockfight as an image and metaphor for who the balinese are and his goal is to understand how they understand themselves and the world what the cockfight symbolizes is Geertz's main objective

Donna Haraway: The Companion Species Manifesto

blend nature and culture "Even though we share placement in the phylum of vertebrates, we inhabit not just different genera and divergent families, but altogether different orders" "In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complexity is the name of our game" "We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand" "The practices and actors in dog world, human and non-human alike, ought to be central concerns of technoscience studies" "Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, and nature and culture in unexpected ways" "This is a story of biopower and biosociality, as well as of technoscience" dog training: "His puppy magically fulfilled the intentions of his omnipotent remote will" "Inter-subjectivity does not mean 'equality', a literally deadly game in dogland; but it does mean paying attention to the conjoined dance of face-to-face significant otherness" her kid and the dog "became significant others to each other"

Funes the Memorious- Borges

brain injury creates an inability to forget therefore, he cannot think because thinking is the inability to forget differences in order to think we have to be able to see the general, the abstract, which is central to culture for Funes there are no systems, but culture is a system

Wilson- Indulgence

café in Seattle when she observes the contradictory behavior of people ordering skim-milk with whip cream on top; people simultaneously want to diet and restrict fat but are indulging at the same time strange dichotomies over food where food is the mediating space between individual and society "we deserve these sinful indulgences don't we?" "the apparent mixture of indulgence and restraint in this particular type of consumption" "I immediately encountered all sorts of surprising tensions between indulgence, morality, pleasure, and restraint" "there does exist a particularly American way of negotiating the line between indulgence and restraint" "coffee was also marketed as if it come from exotic locales" --'kenyan style' "looking like yuppies regardless of the actual state of their personal finances" "Few things in society are as imbued with as much meaning as are sex and eating. Coffee cafés do their best to subtly link the two" "ads show creamy froth in richly textured detail that give it a sensually inviting look" "they appeal to our secret desire for the forbidden" "the American diet derives 60% of its calories from two nutrient: sugar and fat" "Americans of today are obsessed with appearing as though we are avoiding fat" "Americans' preoccupation with slimness while we are, at the same time, growing ever fatter presents an intriguing anomaly" "As anthropologist Sidney Mintz has observed, the consumption of fat and the consumption of low-fat anything are increasing simultaneously" "Each of us thinks we are making our own individual choices here, and of course we are. But we are also responding to moral messages that have been honed over several generations" "prohibition led to the booming popularity of the ice-cream parlor"--sensual, immoral, led young girls astray "the soda shops provided a publicly sanctioned space for overt indulgence between men and women" "innocent indulgence"--because of sexy ads with slogans like purity "customers often hid their cups behind the condiment table as they poured away" when asked about if they felt guilty, "almost everyone initially responded, often with some defiance, that no, they did not. Then almost immediately they would justify their lack of guilt or reverse the statement" equal indulgence between men and women "the question of why we pour our conflicting attitudes of indulgence and restraint into the same cup of coffee" wilson herself does it when she broke her ankle so she couldn't ride her bike so she didn't get a scone but poured herself some half and half

Levi-Strauss- The Making of An Anthropologist

chronic rootlessness; existential predicament where you see the world from afar from many perspectives -anthropology is a way of being in the world where you are more attentive, immersed, and engaged -to learn the truth we must look at things that coincide with our own thinking--the properties of thought become manifest in the ways that I think about the world things that manifest in our minds are not just products of our mental categories but they are products of the world "Through being exposed to such complete and sudden changes of environment, he acquires a kind of chronic rootlessness; eventually, he comes to feel at home nowhere, and he remains psychologically maimed. Like mathematics or music, anthropology is one of the few genuine vocations. One can discover it in oneself, even though one may have been taught nothing about it" "Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it." "While remaining human himself, the anthropologist tries to study and judge mankind from a point of view sufficiently loft and remote to allow him to disregard the particular circumstances of a given society or civilization" "knowledge consists rather in selecting true aspects, that is, those coinciding with the properties of my thought; not because my thought exercises an inevitable influence over things, but because it is itself an object; being of this world, it partakes of the same nature as the world"

Franz Boas-On Alternating Sounds

critique of philologists who used linguistics as a way to biologically justify 'primitiveness' which promoted the idea of racism -philologists weren't hearing different words because these people were inconsistent but because they were hearing different sounds according to their own contexts and phonetic structures -we all use our own context clues to make sense of things we do not understand, which is what he says philologists are doing therefore context is key, especially when studying culture -rise of cultural relativism

E.B. Tylor's definition of culture

culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by people as members of society -complex whole

Maya Deren-Divine Horsemen

dancer who studied in Haiti -in dancing with the people she became accepted through tune and rhythm she connected to the people -ritual of possession in Voudou

Ian Hacking-Making Up People

dynamic nominalism what people could be "I do not believe that motives of these sorts or suicides of these kinds existed until the practice of counting them came into being"--classifications inventions "social change creates new categories of people, but counting is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be" multiple personality as an invention--diagnosis of one leads to the flock of others "once the distinctions were made, new realities effectively came into being" labelling theory "is making up people intimately linked to control?" nominalists vs realists "The claim of dynamic nominalism is not that there was a kind of person who came increasingly to be recognized by bureaucrats or by students of human nature but rather that a kind of person came into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on" "the category and the people in it emerged hand in hand" "Who we are is not only what we did, do, and will do but also what we might have done and may do"--"Changes the space of possibilities for personhood" "degrees of possibility are degrees in the ability of some agent to do or make something"--possibilities are constrained and bounded possibilities emerge from descriptions: "if new modes of description come into being, new possibilities for action come into being in consequence" "The outer reaches of your space as an individual are essentially different from what they would have been had these possibilities not come into being" classifications affect human life and how human life affects classifications

El Reflejo-Kohn and Stevenson

film about his grandmother reflects the one she imposes her structure on them as she's speaking anthropology of individual

Taussig: I swear I saw this

he thinks through his field sketches as well as his writing for him, there are intimate connections in drawings where it's spiritual and there is a communing of spiritual planes like writing "my picture of the people by the freeway is drawn from the flow of life. What I see is real, not a picture. Later I draw it so it becomes an image, but something strange occurs in this transition" "the travail of translation as we oscillate from one realm to the other"

Hand Film

human but it's not disturbing because you try and relate but you can't is it animate or inanimate? anthropology is allowing you to be in this liminal state where you try and make sense of juxtaposing in the world we are living in an uncanny world in the sense of climate change and consumerism

Rosaldo: Headhunter's rage

llongots in Philippines -grief is something foreign unless we experience it he comes to know something about life because he is a positioned subject -when his wife dies, he understands how grief and rage are intertwined

Natasha Schull- Digital Gambling

observed that addicts don't actually want to win, they just want to stay in 'the zone' for hours on end machines are designed to allow for this to happen with minimal distractions and interruptions the addicts want to escape everything when in the zone, to the point where they don't exist anymore and society doesn't exist; non-society "the tendency of modern capitalism to bring space, time, and money into intensified relation and sheds light on the question of what might or might not be unique about the digital age" "productivity enhancement"--"the switch from pull-handle to push-button machines, allowing for rapid play" "the aim is not only to speed up play but to extend its duration" "goes as far as to include noise cancellation technology to remove destructive interference coming from the outside world" "positive reinforcement hides loss"--perception of winning all the time through sensory audio and sound events "digital machines adapt themselves to the unique speed of each player" "different types of humans manifest themselves through different machines, different math" "human diversity solicits technological diversity" "machines garner as high as 89% of revenue" in las vegas the zone is where "conventional spatial, bodily, monetary, and temporal parameters are suspended" it's a "dissociative subjective state" "demand for noninterruption" "speed, to a greater degree than aloneness or noninterruption, is a condition of the zone over which gamblers feel a sense of control" --illusion of control one gambler says "I wasn't totally present, I was gone. My body was there, outside the machine, but at the same time I was inside the machine, inside the game" the player "is not merely socially isolated and made into a fragment of a man but is removed from the palpable dimensions of his own body"--money value disappears "gambler's exits from the constraints of body and money are inextricably linked to an exit from time" "time, like money, becomes a manipulable playing currency rather than a determinative order" "human and machine seem to merge" "as the gap between desire and design grows smaller, the two appear to coincide" "The intensification of digital capabilities leads not only to an exit from embodied space and chronometric time, the dematerialization of money, and the cancellation of desire by way of its immediate fulfillment, but to the falling away of the material technology itself" "the zone exemplifies traits of 'postmodernity'" "Technologies of the digital age are distinct not because they depart from this principle (capitalism) but because they radicalize it, accelerating the convertibility of time, body, labor, and money in the interest of profit, until all those categories vanish" "marks a qualitative shift in social and existential experience"

Margaret Mead "Coming of Age in Samoa"

on adolescence, a difficult time for society -in Samoa, girls were openly sexual therefore, when we think premarital sex is bad, and that this is just a natural fact, it is actually just an aspect of our culture (what we think is natural is actually cultural)

Theodore Bestor: Supply-Side Sushi

our taste and production of sushi says something about globalization -globalization as an organization of diversification locality of culture is not meaningful anymore so anthropology must change with globalization code-switching?? -Atlantic bluefin tuna "conditions of globalization include the increasing velocity of capital and the corresponding acceleration of transportation and telecommunications, all stitching together ever larger ever more fluid, encapsulating markets and other arenas for exchanges across multiple dimensions" global and transnational "a critical question for anthropologists concerned with urban studies is the extent to which forces of globalization have altered or will alter the role of cities as central nodes in the organization of regional, national, and inter or transnational flows of people, material, ideas, power" "I am interested in the ways in which such networks or commodity chains--and the markets they flow through--are inherently cultural in their processes and effects" "in the instance of globalization, the commodity chain itself shapes the framework for cultural interaction and influence against a broader background of cultural dissimilarity and the imaginative possibilities that creates" local in the global and global in the local "As often as not, interactions with global forces are plotted against constellations of local circumstance, fragmentary to an outside observer but forming a coherent, fixed view--a "scape"--to a local" "one can also see domination of commodity chains in terms of the exploitation, deployment, or negotiation of cultural meanings and influences connected to commodity flows" -new demand for multi-sited ethnography "global culture ebbs and flows in multiple directions and along different dimensions simultaneously" Japanese culture also goes to West, just as west goes to east "the organization of diversity in this instance weaves together different modes of production in a complex temporal scheme"

Paul Rabinow

problematizes anthropology as just looking at the practice of fieldwork itself--by analyzing relationships reflexive anthropology where you attend to the actual relations in the fieldwork anthropology actually happens in these microrelationships, not in the observations and interviews it is in this way reflexive because you watch yourself do fieldwork working in a time of decolonization, so what are the power structures between informant and anthropologist

Ruth Behar-The Girl in the Cast

reflections of the one about her memories as a child, and reflections of the death of herself as a child -confronting the human predicament and death in life "after the accident, my childhood ended" "the body doesn't forget" "I had absorbed both the Cuban immigrant paranoia about Cuba as a dangerous place, best left behind forever, and the United States ideology about Cuba as an enemy and a threat" "I looked at myself in the mirror and felt a strange dissociation from the woman who was swinging her arms and legs about to the tune of the music" "If, as Alice Miller argues, coming to terms with one's childhood is a process of mourning, of 'giving up the illusion of the happy childhood', I needed to find others with whom to share my grief" "the difficulty of repossessing alienated limbs" "And yet healing calls for more than a physiological mending; it calls for a full restoration of one's sense of being in one's body and in the world" "girls choose to not know what they know, beginning already the process of silencing the self that is so emblematic of women's depression" "need to overcome the classical self/other dichotomy that structures most autobiographies of childhood" The house on mango street book--> "the story exemplifies how the underground knowledge of girls can become the basis for a new social order" "the woman has to throw an anchor back to the girl she left behind" "the woman who forgets the girl she harbors inside herself runs the risk of meeting her again" "Here I assert that the body is a homeland-a place where knowledge, memory, and pain is stored by the child" "The value of autobiography is that it creates forms of embodied knowledge in which the (adult) self and the (child) other can rediscover and reaffirm their connectedness"

Talking Terror- Taussig

relationship between language and terror the form in which something is circulating (media coverage) is sometimes more important than the thing itself how you choose to represent something becomes a form of domination for example, you cannot rationally explain the phenomenon of terror or you will not do it justice because it is not rational and hence are enabling the power structures example in argentina of the terror within silence in the 70s--silence as a form of violence because people couldn't ground anything anymore "A question of distance, that's what I'd like to say about talking terror, a matter of finding the right distance, holding it at arm's length so it doesn't turn on you" "that's elsewhere, always elsewhere" "But perhaps such an elsewhere should make us suspicious about the deeply rooted sense of order here" "What does it take to understand our reality as a chronic state of emergency as a Nervous System?" "We felt strangely privileged, in so far as we could equate our epoch with ourselves, which is, I suppose, what historical judgement turns upon" "no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism"--Walter Benjamin "There can be no doubt that a situation exists which is no less violent than it is sinister, and that its sinister quality depends on the strategic use of uncertainty and mystery around which stalks terror's talk and to which it always returns" "the arbitrariness of power is practiced as an exquisitely fine art of social control" "state of emergency is not the exception but the rule" "we can start to understand the flow of power connecting terror's talk with the use of disorder through assassination and disappearing people" clarity and opacity--seeing both ways at once--is the optics of the Nervous System "state of doubleness of social being in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event" "war which is 'said to be going on'"--war of silencing "low intensity conflict whose leading characteristic is to blue accustomed realities and boundaries and keep them blurred" "the not said acquires significance and a specific confusion befogs the spaces of the public sphere, which is where the action is" "The point (of silencing) is to drive the memory deep within the fastness of the individual so as to create more fear and uncertainty in which dream and reality commingle" "What the mothers of the disappeared do is to collectively harness this magical power of the lost souls of purgatory and relocate memory in the contested public sphere"

Buffet in Las Vegas Film-Natasha Schull

represents the American dream-the choice of individuality to choose how much and what you binge on how is this film not ethnography? a meaning was already decided upon before filming; an intention was already there; ethnography is about allowing a place to change you and your role as an observer

Birdwhistell and Van Vlack: Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos

shows that when you stabilize the same thing (elephants) and go to different cultures, you can see the differences in the ways people interact with the elephants as a product of culture when he films people interacting in Paris, he turns off the camera because he feels uncomfortable through his own cultural context when in reality it was just a form of communication (not outside the norm, but for him he thought it was)

The one and the many

society happens to value individuality so it's a cultural idea who we are as an individual is product of a larger cultural society that forces us to be that way-everything you do as an individual is socially constrained how is society itself a kind of unity? Durkheim wanted to understand society as an organism because there is something irreducible about society that you cannot reduce to the individual

Deacon: Symbols Aren't Simple

something makes us uniquely human: language and the logic of language which gives us the concept of culture His point is then to overcome nature culture dichotomy so that life itself has representational qualities Mind is a kind of communication, what goes on in the mind is not categorically different from what goes on outside the mind...we tend to think of our minds as somewhat unrelated to outside, but it's all based on communication; who you are is a product of those conversations with signs and communications; who we are as biological entities are based on these using signs what we share with biological life is the representation of things Ferdinand de Saussure with semiology assumed a one-to-one mapping of words onto objects and vice-versa but he says "Such correspondences only capture superficial aspects of word meaning"--reduces a multileveled relationship into a simple mapping relationship premise: "The correspondence between words and objects is a secondary relationship, subordinate to a web of associative relationships of a quite different sort, which even allows us reference to impossible things" 3 fundamental categories of representing (taken from Charles Peirce): 1. icons--something of resemblance, passive, not noticing differences, recognition ex. landscape, portraits "Only after we recognize an iconic relationship can we say exactly what we saw in common, and sometimes not even then" "It is the act of not making a distinction"--ex. camouflage "What makes the moth wings iconic is an interpretive process produced by the bird, not something about the moth's wings" 2. indeces--when something is causally linked to something else, correlated, or associated with it in space or time ex. thermometer indicates temperature "What makes one index of another is the interpretive response whereby one seems to 'point to' the other ex. smell of smoke interpreted as something burning needs something added to be indexical: repeated correlation 3. symbols--some social convention, tacit agreement, or explicit code which establishes the relationship that links one thing to another ex. wedding ring "Symbolic reference derives from combinatorial possibilities and impossibilities, and we therefore depend on combinations both to discover it and to make use of it" "the learning problem associated with symbolic reference is a consequence of the fact that what determines the pairing between a symbol and some object or event is not their probability of co-occurrence, but rather some complex function of the relationship that the symbol has to other symbols" these are on a hierarchy "Peirce rephrased the problem of mind in terms of communication, essentially arguing that all forms of thought are essentially communication organized by an underlying logic that is not fundamentally different for communication processes inside or outside of brains" "No particular objects are intrinsically icons, indices, or symbols. They are interpreted to be so depending on what is produced in response" "similarity does not cause iconicity, nor is iconicity the physical relationship of similarity. It is a kind of inferential process that is based on recognizing a similarity" "The same signs can be icons, indeces, or symbols depending on the interpretive process" "Reference itself is hierarchic in structure; more complex forms of reference are built up from simpler forms" "The competence to interpret something symbolically depends upon already having the competence to interpret many other subordinate relationships indexically" training chimpanzees to use symbolic systems-"They had discovered that the relationship that a lexigram has to an object is a function of the relationship it has to other lexigrams, not just a function of the correlated appearance of both lexigram and object. This is the essence of a symbolic relationship" "They became aware of something they couldn't have noticed otherwise, that there was a system behind it all. And they could use this new information, information about what they had already learned, to simplify greatly the mnemonic load create by the many individual rote associations"--shift from associative predictions to symbolic predictions is initially a change in mnemonic strategy, a recording "The chimps essentially knew something that they had never explicitly learned. They had gained a kind of implicit knowledge as a spontaneous byproduct of symbolic recoding" "Symbols cannot be acquired one at a time, the way other learned associations can, except AFTER a reference symbol system is established" "Associative relationships are brought into relationship to one another by the symbolic relationship" Conclusion-- "Symbols don't just represent things in the world, they also represent each other. Because symbols do not directly refer to things in the world, but indirectly refer to them by virtue of referring to other symbols, they are implicitly combinatorial entities whose referential powers are derived by virtue of occupying determinate positions in an organized system of other symbols" "Because of this systematic relational basis of symbolic reference, no collection of signs can function symbolically unless the entire collection conforms to certain overall principles of organization" ie. there can be no symbolization without systematic relationships--not something added and separate

Sydney Mintz- Sweetness and Power

studied peasants (farmers) instead of primitive societies usually situated in context of power such as the sugar plantations of Puerto Rico where there was slavery -if you follow a commodity, you can learn so much about the structure of power "The upsurge of interest in meaning among anthropologists has also reenlivened the sudy of any subject matter that can be treated by seeing the patterned relationships between substances and human groups as forms of communication" "I shall raise questions about the relationship between production and consumption, in order to see if light may be thrown on what foods mean to those who consume them" "The general spread of these substances through the Western world since the seventeenth century has been one of the truly important economic and cultural phenomena of the modern age" luxury became necessity by those who don't produce it "the period during which so many new ingestibles became encysted within European diet was also the period when the factory system took root, flourished, and spread" "As people produced less and less of their own food, they ate more and more food produced by others, elsewhere" "the availabilities themselves were functions of economic and political forces remote from the consumers" "if the changing consumption patterns are the result of class domination, its particular nature and the forms that it has taken require both documentation and specification"

Kulick-The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes

talking about a cultural difference between what we view as transgendering vs. what brazil does with gender, biology is not destiny--many ways of living and constraints are cultural and social the move of gender and sex is like the move anthropology made from biological racism—nature is to culture as sex is to gender shows us that the dichotomy between sex and gender is a cultural construct in Latin America; only males who enjoy being anally penetrated are homosexual gender system in brazil is men and non-men he says our gender system is based on sex while in Brazil, it is based on sexuality--no sex change in brazil, not about what genitals you have but how you use them (behavior) for us, biological difference is what determines behavior in Brazil behavior determines gender "sex between males in this part of the world does not necessarily result in both partners being perceived as homosexual. The crucial determinant of a homosexual classification is not so much the fact of sex as it is the role performed during the sexual act" "gender, in this particular elaboration, is grounded not so much in sex as it is grounded in sexuality" men and not-men worked among travestis, effeminized prostitutes in Salvador Brazil "Most telling of the special placed reserved for travestis in the Brazilian popular image is the fact that the individual widely acclaimed to be the most beautiful woman in Brazil was a travesti"--Roberta Close "Travestis do not merely don female attributes, they incorporate them"-by injecting themselves with massive doses of female hormones -they don't do it because they want to be a woman-->"A trevesti is not a woman and can never be a woman because God created them male" -sex doesn't change they do it because "they feel themselves to be feminine" "virtually every travesti values her penis"-->no sex changes "A man will happily penetrate another male's anus. But he will not touch or express any desire for another male's penis. For him to do so would be tantamount to relinquishing his status as a man" -if travesti boyfriends show interest in her penis, the relationship would be over "Males can shift gender depending on the context and the actions they perform. The same is not true for females" "there is no third or intermediate sex here" "The fundamental difference is that, whereas the northern Euro-American gender system is based on sex, the gender system that structures travestis' perceptions and actions is based on sexuality" "the determinative criterion in the identification of males and females is not so much the genitals as it is the role those genitals perform in sexual encounters" ****** and woman used interchangeably gay men who don't dress like women and modify themselves to be more feminine are seen as fake men when really they're not men (bc they're gay) "Culturally speaking, travestis, because they enjoy being anally penetrated, are structurally equivalent to, even if they are not biologically identical to, women" "This provides individuals a conceptual framework that they can draw on in order to understand and organize their own and others' desires, bodies, affective and physical relations, and social roles" "researchers who discuss gender tend to either not define it, or do so by placing it in a seemingly necessary relationship to sex" defines gender as "a social and symbolic arena of ongoing contestation over specific identities, behaviors, rights, obligations, and sexualities" "The denial of travestis' gender as not-men may not be so much a reaction against them as gender crossers as it is a reaction against unattractiveness in people, whose job it is to make themselves attractive for men"

Nature and anthropology

the nature vs. nurture debate post-boas anthropology was necessary to overcome scientific racisms and eugenics but has created a divide between nature and culture and now we can't seem to figure out how to talk about nature without it as a cultural concept

Gershon: Breaking up is hard to do

the problem of creating and separating relations in a situation with many media forms to do this, which is the right way? how we are as a society is not fully separable from technology the idea of a social death a crossing of mediations "When Americans discuss how a medium affects a conversation, they implicitly compare that medium to other possible options, and, sometimes, decide to reconfigure the interacts by shifting the conversational exchanges to another medium" "contemporary US media ideologies of the 'newness' of new media are shaped in part by the possibilities and practicalities of media switching" "People are reflecting upon emerging and multiple moral imaginations about what constitutes proper and improper use of new technologies" "Concerned with how people's media ideologies shape their experiences of media switching, focusing on one way that people engage with their changing media ecologies"

The Mindful Body-Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock

the question of dualism--pervasive in Western thought designed machine and designer with science task to figure out the facts of the machine (the body, the world) Descartes says mind and body come together in pineal gland Lock and Hughes critique this because they say non-Westerners aren't always dualists therefore it is cultural and can be critiqued "insofar as medical anthropology has failed to problematize the body, it is destined to fall prey to the biological fallacy and related assumptions that are paradigmatic to biomedicine" -separation of mind from body, spirit to matter, and real from unreal "Since this epistemological tradition is a cultural and historical construction and not one that is universally shared, it is essential that we begin with a suspension of our usual belief to the mind/body oppositions" "Begin with the assumption of the body as simultaneously a physical and symbolic artifact, as both naturally and culturally produced" "the three bodies"-->the individual body (phenomenology), the social body (structuralism and symbolism), the body politic (regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies)(poststructuralism) "This kind of radically materialist thinking, characteristic of clinical biomedicine, is the product of a Western epistemology": "Hippocrates cautioned the Greek physician to treat only what was observable and palpable to the senses" "Descartes, a devout Catholic, was able to preserve the soul as the domain of theology, and to legitimate the body as the domain of science"-->"mechanistic concept of the body" "Even in psychoanalytically informed psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine there is a tendency to categorize and treat human afflictions as if they were either wholly organic or wholly psychological in origin" "Medicalization inevitably entails a missed identification between the individual and the social bodies, and a tendency to transform the social into the biological" Durkheim-->"Man is double, referring to the biological and the social" Freud-->"proposed a human drama in which natural, biological drives locked horns with the domesticating requirements of the social and moral order" Marx-->"labor humanizes and domesticates nature. It gives life to inanimate objects, and it pushes back the natural frontier, leaving a human stamp on all that it touches" alternative ontologies: 1.culture is rooted in (rather than against) nature 2. cultural materialists view social institutions as adaptive responses to certain fixed, biological foundations "non-Western societies have developed alternative epistemologies that tend to conceive of relations among similar entities in monistic rather than in dualistic terms" 2 representations of holistic thought: 1. "the conception of harmonious wholes in which everything from the cosmos down to the individual organs of the human body are understood as a single unit" 2. complementary dualities "the relationship of parts to the whole is emphasized" ex. Chinese yin-yang (dynamic equilibrium of cosmos) "Islamic cosmology depicts humans as having dominance over nature" "In Buddhist traditions the natural world is a product of mind, in the sense that the entire cosmos is essentially 'mind'. Through mediation individual minds can merge with the universal mind" "In Japan, it is still the family which is considered the most 'natural' fundamental unit of society not the individual" "Read argues that the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea lack a concept of the person altogether: Individual identity and social identity are two sides of the same coin"--no concept of friendship or the individual apart from structured social roles "In cultures lacking a highly individualized or articulated conception of the body-self it should not be surprising that sickness is often explained or attributed to malevolent social relations, or to the breaking of social and moral codes" "There are societies that view the individual as comprised of a multiplicity of selves" ex. Bororo "The Western conception of one individual, one self effectively disallows or rejects social, religious, and medical institutions predicated on ethnopsychologies that recognize as normative a multiplicity of selves" "Once an organ captures the imagination of a people, there appears to be no end to the metaphorical uses to which it may be put"--ex. obsession with the live, or Midwestern farmers obsessive with the backbone and being upright "ethnoanatomical perceptions, including body image, offer a rich source of data both on the social and cultural meanings of being human and on the various threats to health, well-being, and social integration that humans are believed to experience" "The body, as Mary Douglas observed, is a natural symbol supplying some of our richest sources of metaphor. Cultural constructions of and about the body are useful in sustaining particular views of society and social relations" "Insofar as the body is both physical and cultural artifact, it is not always possible to see where nature ends and culture begins in the symbolic equations" "To a great extent, talk about the body and about sexuality tends to be talk about the nature of society" "Bastien concludes that Qollahuaya body concepts are fundamentally holistic rather than dualistic (The whole is greater than the sum of the parts)" in non-Western ethnomedical systems "the body is not understood as a vast and complex machine, but rather as a microcosm of the universe"-->conveys unique autonomy with humans in control "The mind/body dichotomy and the body alienation characteristic of contemporary society may also be linked to capitalist modes of production in which mental labors are divided and ordered into a hierarchy" "In modern society man has adopted the language of the machine to describe his body"--"the structure of individual and collective sentiments down to the feel of one's body and the naturalness of one's position and role in the technical order is a social construct" The body politic--- "The relationships between individual and social bodies are also about power and control" "Even when the threats are real, the true aggressors may not be known, and witchcraft can become the metaphor or the cultural idiom for distress"--when a group feels threatened "In the context of increasing commoditization of human life, witchcraft accusations point to the social distortions and dis-ease in the body politic generated by capitalism"--controlling bodies in times of crisis In US, "ill health is no longer viewed as accidental, a mere quirk of nature, but rather is attributed to the individual's failure to live right, to eat well, to exercise etc." "Cultures are disciplines that provide codes and social scripts for the domestication of the individual body in conformity to the needs of the social and political order" "This funnelling of diffuse but real complaints into the idiom of sickness has led to the problem of 'medicalization' and to the overproduction of illness in contemporary advanced industrial societies"--woman explains that now everyone's sick "The power of the state now depended on the ability to control physical potency and fertility" emotion--- they question "whether any expression of human emotion and feeling is ever free of cultural shaping and cultural meaning" Geertz-->"Without culture we would simply not know how to feel" "We suggest that (emotions) provide an important missing link capable of bridging mind and body, individual, society, and body politic" "Rosaldo has recently charged social and psychological anthropologists to pay more attention to the force and intensity of emotions in motivating human action" "In collective healing rituals there is a merging, a communion of mind/body, self/other, individual/group that acts in largely non-verbal and even prereflexive ways to 'feel' the sick person back to a state of wellness and wholeness and to remake the social body" Conclusion- "To admit the 'as-ifness' of our ethnoepistemology is to court a Cartesian anxiety--the fear that in the absence of a sure, objective foundation for knowledge we would fall into the void, into the chaos of absolute relativism and subjectivity" "Sickness is not just an isolated event, nor an unfortunate brush with nature. It is a form of communication--the language of the organs--through which nature, society, and culture speak simultaneously" "The individual body should be seen as the most immediate, the proximate terrain where social truths and social contradictions are played out, as well as a locus of personal and social resistance, creativity, and struggle"

Wiseman: High School Film

we think we are in a society where we are free to do whatever it is we like but in reality, society shapes us from an early age and places constraints on who we can be; individuality is a social construct

Turner- The Social Skin

worked among Amazonians who marked their skin in rituals metaphor of spilling your guts: breaking down some of the social boundaries marked by the skin the body is a frontier between the biological and the social self ex. clothing, tattoos, etc. we use culture to communicate who we are but we are also made by culture skin is the social filter biological life is produced by a society and is dependent on our culture and social life -"the self is a composite product of social and natural (libidinous) components" "This is that culture, which we neither understand nor control, is not only the necessary medium through which we communicate our social status, attitudes, desires, beliefs, and ideals to others, but also to a large extent constitutes these identities, in ways with which we are compelled to conform regardless of our self-consciousness or even our contempt" "The surface of the body becomes, in any human society, a boundary of a peculiarly complex kind, which simultaneously separates domains lying on either side of it and conflates different levels of social, individual and intra-psychic meaning" "The skin are the concrete boundary between the self and other, the individual and society" the body represents "kind of common frontier of society which becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted"