Intro to Cultural Anthropology

Culture as Personalities

"A culture, like an individual. is more or less a consistent pattern of thought and action" (Benedict, 46).

Joanne Entwistle

"Fashion and the Fleshy Body" -Analyzing gender and dress from the point of view of bodily experience/practice Embarrassment that comes w failing to do certain social practices such as a stained clothes

Emile Durkeim

"Father of Sociology": tried to theorize the "social" and how it takes hold on the individual. aka the social comes first. Coined the term, " Social Fact"

Benedict's View on Normal/Abnormal

"bad" and "good", normal and abnormal cannot be defined in universal or context-free terms (238); they must always be understood relative to the society in question.

Dual Nature

"there are the sensations and sensory tendencies on the one hand, conceptual thought and moral activity on the other... not just distinct, they are opposed."

Charles Murray

(Best known for his controversial book 'The Bell Curve', co-authored with Richard Herrnstein in 1994) gives his opinion about the long-standing IQ gap between whites and blacks. Shows that scientific racism is still relevant today.

Culture as semiotic

A system of signs and symbols

Emerson, Fretz & Shaw

All three treat human behavior as signifying action - that is, action conveying meaning

Habitus

An ensemble of techniques; aspects of culture that are anchored in the body or daily practices of individuals, groups, societies, and nations.

Salvage Ethnography

Anthropological research conducted in order to document cultures that are "disappearing" i.e., expect to disappear in the near future.

Polysemy

Any message or code always contains more than one potential meaning besides the intended or preferred one.

Phenomenological approach

Approach that views culture as directly experienced in the body and inscribed in practice

Erving Goffman

Sociologist "Microsociology" Face to Face interactions Known for symbolic interaction theory

Semiotic conception of culture

Spoken by Michael Jackson. Symbolic, ideal approach. -sees body as "communicating. codifying, symbolizing, signifying" social meanings

Alfred Kroeber

The first student of Franz Boas and a prolific writer, he was one of the early proponents of Boas' theory of "cultural relativism," and a major force in bringing it into the mainstream of anthropology. Their work focused on Native American tribes, and he invested his energy into recording every detail of their cultures, not only the material aspects, but also their social structures and roles, as well as their moral and spiritual beliefs.

Scientific Racism

The idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics.

What is a symbol that is imparted by context?

The wink

Ruth Benedict

US Anthropologist "Patterns of Culture" Believes primitive cultures are ideal "laboratories" for study, because they are relatively simple, stable, and isolated.

Social Fact

Values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. Term was coined by Emile Durkheim.

Barry Wenda

a Papua New Guinean leader who criticized Jared Diamond. One of Diamond's arguments was that the Indonesian state brought peace to the warring Papuan tribes. This person said that Diamond ignored the fact that the Indonesian military was violently repressing his people.

Establishing Rapport

a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well.

Homo Duplex

a man on the one hand is a biological organism, driven by instincts, with desire and appetite and on the other hand is being led by morality and other elements generated by society.

Structuralism

a method of interpreting and analyzing such things as language, literature, and society, which focuses on contrasting ideas or elements of structure and attempts to show how they relate to the whole structure.

Cultural Capital

a question of etiquette and manners, tastes, preferences, styles of consumption, walking/talking.

Franz Boaz

argued against contemporary theories of racial distinction between humans. His work culminated with his theory of relativism, which discredited prevailing beliefs that Western civilization is superior to simpler societies.

"Alternating Sounds"

argued that "alternating sounds" is not at all a feature of Native American languages—indeed, he argued, they do not really exist. Rather than take alternating sounds as objective proof of different stages in cultural evolution, Boas considered them in terms of his longstanding interest in the subjective perception of objective physical phenomena. He also considered his earlier critique of evolutionary museum displays. There, he pointed out that two things (artifacts of material culture) that appear to be similar may, in fact, be quite different.

Habitus (Bourdieu)

Modes of perception and action, of bodily bearing and sensibility of feeling, or likes and dislikes, that fundamentally shape us (or are us). Through this, what is social appears natural. It is always a relation to power. -Naturalizes inequality

The Neur

Nilotic ethnic group in Sudan that was observed by EE Evans-Pritchard. Tried to produce a "true outline of the Nuer social structure." - not as it appears for any one in particular, but as it objectively is. (failed to do so since the Neur people were disgusted of his presence due to their experience of colonialism) -"I" was not present -references of political situation disappeared

Symbols

Objects that society gives meaning to

Jocks/Burnouts

constitute a binary, reciprocal system

Non-Linear Anthropology

each of the research stages are feeding into and shaping one another

Thick description

one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider.

Cultural Relativism

the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another. You cannot rank cultures hierarchically.

Clifford Geertz

was considered a founder of interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology. Culture as a text, or a work of art - a system of symbols and meanings. achieved rapport by assimilating to the balinese village rather than doing his anthropological work as an outsider "peasant mentality"

E.B. Tylor

○ British Anthropologist ○ Primitive Culture (1871) ○ Anthropology = "The science of culture" ○ Was the first to give the definition of culture ○ Culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society"

Cultural Evolution

- Tylor thought that all cultures would natural evolve though the same sequence of stages - So, the vast diversity of human cultures represent different stages in the evolution of human culture

Jared Diamond

-Like Tylor, fascinated with range of human variation -Wants to specify and denaturalize the taken-for-granted assumptions of WEIRD societies -Traditional societies "have come up with thousands of solutions to human problems, solutions different from those adopted by our own weird modern societies -Like tylor, looking for underlying, law-like causes and broad, generalizable patterns to explain the world's diversity

Critiques of Durkeim

1. Durkheim relies on accounts of "primitive cultures" for his theory and argues that the totem of the society reflects the society as a whole and thus becomes bigger than any one person and the society itself. 2. For Durkheim all of life is divided between the sacred and the profane and society maintains the boundaries between the two. But in many ways the sacred and the profane are not so easily bounded. 3. Religion Theory is too broad

How does one do anthropology?

1. Fieldwork (observation) 2. Fieldnotes (data collection) 3. Ethnography (description/analysis)

Classification of Societies

1. Savage (hunter-gatherer) 2. Barbarian (domestication of plants and animals) 3. Civilized (literate)

Critiques on Ruth Benedict

1. She thought societies primitive societies do not change over time 2. Studied individuals in labs/ treated them as experiments

Classification of societies

Band - Tribe - Chiefdom - State

Mary Douglas

Believes that rules about purity/impurity are an effort to organize and give meaning to the world. "Dirt offends order"

What are not social facts?

Biological and psychological phenomena

What particular activity did Geertz study?

Cockfight in Bali (viewed as an art form)

Body Techniques

Coined by Marcel Mauss Products of society but not as a totality Is learned through imitation of others we have confidence in/have authority over us (successfully performed)

EE Evans-Pritchard

Ethnographer who conducted substantial periods of fieldwork between 1926 and 1939 in eastern Africa with the Azande, Nuer, Anuak, Shilluk, and Nilotic Luo peoples

Why does Geertz think art is important?

It suddenly co-ordinates and brings into focus a great many such impressions.

Ishi

Last Californian Yahi Indian - was observed by Kroeber

Penelope Eckert

Linguist "Jocks and burnouts" (1989)

To Diamond, how are the Classification of societies related?

For Diamond these categories are related along a temporal axis, from least to most complex, and from earliest to most modern.

Marcel Mauss

French Socialist "Techniques of the body" Believed that bodies are shaped by society; what we think is normal is not the only normal way.

Teleological approach

History as a single line, with a clear direction (savagery towards civilization)

Ethnocentrism

Positions "us" at the apex of history; all others heading in the same direction, only belatedly.

Bourdieu's principle concern

Power and dominance; how they are reproduced; and why they seem 'natural.'

Historical Particularism

Rejected the cultural evolutionary model (Macro-Comparisons) that had dominated anthropology until Boas. It argued that each society is a collective representation of its unique historical past.

Empirical Research

Research based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.

Craniometry

Rests on the idea of a fixed, physiological basis of race. It was thought that by measuring skulls, one could draw conclusions about entire racial groups.

Objective vs. Interpretative

Scientific vs humanistic/symbloic

Gender Display

Simple, formalized, generic behaviors that are easily readable (gender). How we signal to one another our respective social positions, which structures social interactions.