ANTH MIDTERM NOTES

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Anthropology

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Oct 30, 2023

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MIDTERM NOTES WEEK 1 (Cultural Anthropology) Cultural anthropology studies humans and what it means to be human ● A study of people’s lived experiences (through their relations with others and constitutions) ● Study how people think and act within specific social contexts ● From a zoomed-in perspective and long-term immersive study ● Break down generalizations/stereotypes of society ● Use a set of concepts and methods Devin Proctors’ Definition of Cultural Anthropology ● Studies of human relations in the present ● Need to understand society and their past ● Focuses on how people behave and create communities ○ What are the criteria people have to create a community? ● Focus on social practices ● Understanding differences between societies ● Different ideas of solidarities between cultural anthropologists Methods ● Long-term research, live within communities, spend extensive periods of time with the community ● Fieldwork ● Focus on specific social contexts, study how people act and think in the settings ● Go in without a predetermined idea (cognitive bias) of what they want to test out Ethnography ● Definitions: ○ Tradition of research and mode of representing social life through writing ○ Study, describe, represent, and theorize a culture or social world (with a certain degree of particularity) ■ The theories are not universally applicable ■ The theory is grounded in specificity ○ A research tradition whose roots are firmly planted in the fields of anthropology and qualitative sociology ● Ethnographic methods ○ Data collection tools ■ Participant observation → being a part of a social situation and observing them at the same time ● A way to get to know the deeply rooted culture, knowing their everyday life that usually seems granted/mundane, unspoken rules

■ Fieldnotes → written observations/maps/notes during interviews ■ Interviews ● Speech events ● What they say and don’t say; What people say they do doesn’t always mean that they act the same way ○ Data analysis ■ Analyze data through speech pattern analysis, textual coding, historical research (archival) ○ Written analysis ■ Articulating the data as part of a broader historical, political, and cultural context ■ Tracing how a particular social phenomenon unfolds over time Dilemmas: Emic vs Etic ● Emic → how people you are studying discuss, frame, and make sense of what’s happening to them and around them ○ How the local people describe what they are doing ○ Insider perspective ○ Researcher attempts to comprehend the subjective meaning that people give ● Etic → how you as anthropologists would frame those same dynamics ○ The interpretation of the anthropologist ○ Outsider perspective ○ Distancing, use known theories and frameworks ● Dilemma for ethnography ○ Need to have approval from the community ○ Try not to disrupt the dynamics of the community Objective knowledge ● The aim of ethnography is to grasp the native’s pov, their relation to life, and realize their vision of their world (Malinowski) ● Objective knowledge ○ A piece of information that can be reproduced no matter who is observing ○ Empirically verifiable Horace Miner - Body Ritual Among the Nacirema ● Context ○ 1950s → Anthropology questions how it determines cultural difference ○ Should anthropologists view the people they study in terms of how different they are from the anthropologist's society (Western) ○ How is difference determined? How do we know when we have spotted a true difference? ○ Should anthropologists study their own societies and try to show how unique they are?

● About the reading ○ Satirical essay on how anthropology represents difference ○ Nonwestern society is not the only place where ‘magic things happen ○ Nacirema → American spelled backwards ○ Make strange, exotify particular groups of people; make it an object of exotification ○ A way to defamiliarize western society WEEK 2 (Defining and Reimagining Culture) Three takes on culture ● Edward Burnett Tylor ○ Culture → customs, languages, rituals, food, behaviours ○ Neat whole → unique to a group of people and are the same for them ○ Have their own internal logic ○ Culture essentialism → have their own logic, not influenced by outside culture and don’t influence them ○ Definition filtered through a focus on remote societies ○ Asks what makes some cultures more advanced than other ■ Evolutionary theory → some society starts from a lower starting point than others, but all are progressing toward civilization; it is already debunked ○ Method ■ Asks do different cultures have certain components of Western society ■ Rooted in secondary sources (travelogues, missionary booklets) ● Franz Boas ○ Culture → customs, traditions, rituals, language, BUT ALSO how people explain their beliefs, ways of living and how they build community with others (social relations) ○ Product of historical events ○ Change over time ○ Any differences in the ‘level of development’ are due to multiple factors ○ Rejects cultural essentialism ○ Filtered through time with indigenous communities ○ Asks how cultures have come to be the way they are ■ Inter-cultural contact, changes in environment, foreign influence ○ Methods ■ Interact with people of cultures and ask them to describe their social dynamics ■ Combine with archaeological methods, in-person observation

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● Bronislaw Malinowski ○ Culture —> customs, traditions, rituals, language, BUT ALSO how people explain their beliefs, ways of living and how they build community with others (social relations) ○ Neat wholes ○ Have their own internal logic ○ Filtered through looking at a solely inter-island exchange and no historical perspective ○ Asks what function different components of culture have → functionalism ○ Founder of functionalism —> components of a society serve a job, and together they make the society operate and fulfill needs ○ Still kinda believes in a primitive and advanced society, very aware of European colonialism Reinvents anthropology methodology (by Malinowski) ● Participant observation ○ Complete immersion ○ Different from Boas’ distanced approach ○ Made a break from armchair anthropology (Tylor) ○ Observe dissonance between what people say they do and what they actually do ○ Time and energy required; can lead to disorientation ● Challenges Boasian anthropology ○ Look at the instructions of a culture and how they function in their own context ○ Etic approach → framework of the anthropologist (outside perspective) ○ Not asking societies what they do, but observing what they do through his own interpretation i’m

Malinowski - The Kula ● Economic component of the larger culture of the Trobriand islands in New Guinea ● An inter-island system of exchange (Kula) ○ Western society —> gifts and gift giving not associated with economy, more on profit ○ Gift-giving is about reciprocity and sustaining relationships ○ Value in an object comes from giving them away, not having it ○ Kula ring functions to sustain social relationships and heighten an individual’s status in society and provide people with resources that can’t be found on the island ● Based on the circulation of armshells and necklets of red-shell discs ○ Exchange is not about utility but about value ○ The exchange is very ceremonial and based on complex rules ○ The people who exchange are called partners, life-long relationships established ● Kula is based on hierarchies ○ The higher the hierarchy, have more partners ● Intermediary gifts and competition ● Kula vs Barter ○ Barter is more transactional ○ Kula is about building trust and preserving honour ○ Accountability is measured by how liberal one is in gift giving ● Time and ownership ○ Ownership not prevalent ○ Articles not kept for long

Lila Abu-Lughod ● Ethnographic work based in Egypt with the Awlad ‘Alli Bedouin ● Media, politics, social life ● Role of liberal Feminists in the Muslim world ● Functionalist Abu-Lughod’s critique of Malinowski’s approach to the study of culture ● Feminist theory ● Openings ○ Malinowski wants to grasp the nation’s pov through an outsider’s perspective (etic approach)

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○ Malinowski treats culture as functional systems (not as irrational, savage, barbaric societies with no reason) ○ Moves away from armchair anthropology ● Limitations ○ Malinowski implicitly centers the west as the reference point → Tries to tell the story of the Kula by how different it is from the western economy ○ Try to understand the ‘other’ in term of how different from the ‘self’ or using frameworks familiar to him Self/other binary → a framework in which the Self seeks validation of their own worldview and existence through the identification of that which is seen as wholly different ● Center something as the norm ● Anthropology’s definition of culture has been invested in self-validation Abu-Lughod: looking at third-wave feminism into why the Self/Other binary is limiting ● Anthropology has cornered the Other in the Self/Other Binary ○ Create a hierarchy between the researcher and the Other ○ It portrays the Other in relation to the anthropologist Self ○ Implies that the anthropologist gaze is the superior one ● Feminist movement in the US ○ First wave ■ Advocating for equal property and contract rights for women ■ Oppose the idea that they are the property of men ■ Right to vote ○ Second wave ■ Reproductive rights ■ Equal pay ■ Gender equality in the workplace ■ Marital rights ○ Third wave ■ By African American and POC women ■ Second-wave feminism doesn't reflect the communities of POC women ■ Over-policing of the POC women's communities ■ Second-wave feminism ends up othering POC women ■ Second-wave assumes all women face the same challenges and want the same things; have the same opportunities and discrimination ● What can feminists do to change the Self/Other Binary? ○ Recognize how first and second-wave feminism reflects a very specific type of person’s experience (white woman) ○ Take seriously the idea that different people living in different places in different periods of time want different things (have different lived experiences)

○ Take the intersectionality (from third-wave feminism) framework to develop a more nuanced approach to a different culture Intersectionality → A framework that allows us to understand how people experience privilege and discrimination; shows the different social factors that shape a person's lived experience ● Shaped by multiple identities Diaspora → a group of people who have been displaced from their ancestral homeland and their children live in different places, but still have a connection to the ancestral place ● Diasporic anthropologists share a connection to the community they study and provide unique insight that unsettles the self/other binary ● Abu-Lughod ○ Palestinian and American ● Stereotypes of diasporic scholars ○ Incapable of maintaining distance from who they are studying ■ Bring their own framework, reinforcing self/other binary ○ Incapable of studying the communities from a non-self-referential lens ○ As seen as producing biased, tainted, and self-referential analyses ● Problems ○ Assume that the diasporic scholars and the community have the same experience ○ Assume that non-diasporic scholars are non-biased, not bring a framework ○ Assume ancestral connections are the only connections that the diasporic scholars have with the culture ● Diasporic scholars are both connected and distanced from the culture they study ○ The scholar’s self is multiple; hence they don’t fall into the self/other binary ○ Culture would be more multi-site

● Alternative #1: Doing ethnographic research that focuses on discourse and practice ○ Looking at how people come together around common framings and strategies, improvisations ○ How they frame their experiences ○ Avoids explaining things in terms of colonialism ● Alternative #2: Tracing connections ○ Instead of learning culture as something that is stuck, they learn to trace the connections that lead to the culture now ○ By which social relations come to the way they are ○ What are the historical processes by which certain social relations come to be ○ Account for social change ○ More multi-sited work ● Alternative #3: Ethnographies of the particular ○ Follow the lives of particular individuals and document their everyday lives, fears challenges, aspirations ○ Not trying to say something about a whole category of people, does not take categories as a given ○ Sees individual stories as debunking generalizations ● Orientalism ○ A way of producing knowledge about what is known as the East in ways that validate the identity of the West ○ Example of scholarship that reinforces self/other binary

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WEEK 3 (Colonial Encounter) Colonialism: the project of political domination by one group over another; includes domination of land, economy, culture, political system, and religion ● Historical periods of colonialism: ○ 11th-century Crusades ○ 14th-century conquest of the Americas ○ European conquest in the 19th century of over half the planet ○ Settler colonialism continues today ● Settler colonialism → the controller tries to take the land ● Explicit and implicit forms of power ○ Explicit: enslavement, wage labour, conquest of land, taxes, setting up new government, destruction of whole communities ○ Implicit: control over culture, language, worldview, loyalties (to the colonizers)/allegiances Coloniality → long-standing patterns of power that emerge from colonialism that define culture, labour, intersubjective (social) relations, and knowledge production well beyond the limits of colonial administrations. ● Maintained in books, criteria for academic performance, cultural patterns, common sense, self-image of people, aspirations of self, etc ● Representation and how they internalized the representation ● When the representation is distributed, they settle and become a ‘truth’ Colonialism and Knowledge in Afghanistan ● Mountstuart Elphinstone (from Scotland) ○ First person to study Afghanistan through travel ○ Appointed to East India Company in India (1976) ○ Part of the first British diplomatic mission to Afghanistan in 1808 ○ His mission put Afghanistan on the colonial map ● How an attempt to produce objective knowledge becomes harmful → used towards colonial domination ○ Mounstuart Elphinstone’s account of Kabul, Afghanistan ○ Published in 1815 based on hearsay and anecdotal reports ○ Leads to generalizations ● How is the account colonial? ○ Elphinstone’s account is different from other colonial accounts → his account was more intellectually curious, did not associate tribe with race, see similarities with his own society ○ BUT, his account becomes harmful because future colonial administrators use his ideas (generalizations) to justify British colonialism in Afghanistan in 1838 and 1878 ○ His account sets the stage for the policy reports and research of future colonial administrators

Talal Asad ● Impact of colonialism on Egypt Talal Asad - Introduction: Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter ● British social anthropology is not appreciated as it used to be ● At a certain period, social anthropology was about the society of primitive societies, making it distinct from Sociology ● Now, the objects and methods of Anthropology changed to study simple and complex societies; use participant observation, statistical techniques, historical archives, and literary sources; similar to other subjects ● WW2 and decolonization movements change anthropology ○ Anthropology apprehends the world in it is located; the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it ● Functionalism did not allow anthropology to understand where societies fit in the global system of power ● Anthropology is rooted in unequal power encounters between the West and Third World which goes back to the emergence of bourgeois Europe; this gives the West access to cultural and historical information about the societies they dominated ● Asad’s point → anthropology historically has been shaped by the relationship between the West and the Global South (previously colonized) ○ Gives the West access to cultural and historical information ○ Need to understand the conditions of scholars in the West that allow them to go to the countries, sometimes they are part of colonial expedition; access to financial capital, etc; a privilege Wazhmah Osman - Television and the Afghan Culture Wars ● Goals ○ Counter prevailing stereotypes about Afghan culture as static, unchanging, and bound by archaic tradition ○ Redirect the global dialogue about Afghanistan to local Afghans themselves ○ Imperialism → the policy of exerting domination of territories through direct and/or indirect control of their political/economic systems (not necessarily territorial) ■ Imperialism in the text → different development agencies in Afghanistan led by the us ● Argument → despite the fact that Afghan media producers are operating in arenas that face many threats, they are supported by the popularity of their work, they create a space for activism ● Countering stereotypes (put in place by colonial representation) ○ The prevailing image of Afghan society ■ Hopeless landscape ■ Powerless people are passive victims of backward traditions of another time

■ Women as passive and need to be saved (post 9/11 discourse); ignores the long history that women in Afghanistan are fighting for equality ○ Reality ■ Hopeful about the future ■ Engage in healthy debate about liberty and democracy ■ Women are active participants in media making ● Methods ○ 2008-2014 multi-sited fieldwork → across Afghanistan, neighbour countries (the Afghan televisions also go there) ○ Primarily interviews (109) with media makers and consumers ○ Auto-ethnography ■ Anthropologist use their own lived experience to interpret the social dynamics they have observed in the field ■ Has to be paired with other methods (participant observation, etc) ● Talks about her experience growing up in 1970s Afghan ● Family members’ experiences and participation in television and radio ○ How is the project born? ■ Interviews with key figures (government officials, religious leaders, TV station owners) and TV consumers across class backgrounds ■ Conducted in Dari and Pashto ■ Took place in their homes to distinguish how the issues are discussed publicly and privately (what they say vs what they do) Osman's differences with colonial accounts of Afghanistan ● Avoid generalizations ● Discuss the perspectives of people that were interviewed ● Directly quotes the people ● Clear about where they visited and what they left out (not claiming about holistic, all-encompassing study) ● Does not treat culture as static How Osman’s text counter colonial representation ● Influence of imperialism and colonialism on Afghan media-making → stereotypes ○ Colonialism and imperialism allow anthropology to happen in Afghan → justify colonialism ● The complicated relationship that media makers have to foreign influence and power

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● How local people are trying to reclaim their own futures Zoe Todd - How to Decolonize Anthropology in Canada ● Bridge the divide between lived experience and scholarship; the personal informs the political ● Reciprocal relationality between academic spaces and the lands and territories we live and work in ● Speak with rather than speak for - decenter the anthropologist self, supremacy/fragility ● The participatory ethos → based on the intensive commitment to time, people are more than variables on a survey Week 4 (Race) Alan Goodman - Race is Real, But It's Not Genetic ● Race is a highly flexible way in which societies lump people into groups based on appearance that is assumed to be indicative of deeper biological or cultural connections ○ Racial categories do not map onto any kind of scientific conclusion ○ Scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries believe there is a scientific basis behind racial classifications ○ Certain groups, by virtue of what phenotype (physical characteristics) they fell into, was seen as more susceptible to certain behaviours and personality traits ● The idea that race is biological or genetic is the social construct Carl Linnaeus and the beginnings of Human Classification ● Race is a byproduct of human classification → Goodman ● Inspired by Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being → hierarchical matter where all matter and living organisms are arranged in a continuum, humans are at the top ● Classification of Human types in Systema Naturae (it was marginalized then, people didn't care) ○ Divides humans into four (Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans) ○ Based on physical characteristics and associated them with the geographical locations and perceived behaviours ○ Africanus is always at the bottom with irrational behaviour ● Groundwork for racial classification ○ People who look like X belong to Y group of people ○ Y group of people has a,b,c biological and behavioural traits Race: A category based on conflation/combination of geographic ancestry with biological traits/difference ● The assumption that geographic ancestry, which indeed matters to genetics, can be conflated with race, which does not ○ People living in different places may be susceptible to physical vulnerability, but it's not because of genetics but because of the environment ● Races vs racialization

○ Racialization → the social process by which certain groups of people are singled out (in various ways) on the basis of real or imagined physical characteristics ■ Forms of singling out → systematically depriving groups of rights, resources, and recognitions and elevating others ■ The bad environment they live in contributed to their physical development Race: a retroactive category ● The term race gained traction in the 18th century in North America, but the ideas behind it were in full force from the 15-17th centuries ● Portuguese colonization of Africa ○ Circulation of pamphlets about Africans being inferior because of their skin colour ● Trans-Atlantic slave trade ○ People are inferior so they are always in a state that can be exploited or enslaved ● Proponents of colonialism used the logic that differences in appearance were also differences in ranking ● Race is seen as biological, unchanging, and a god given quality The problem with race ● There is nothing ‘essential’ about members who are categorized as part of a racial group - biologically or behaviourally ● There are no natural hierarchies between people ○ Because you are told by someone that you are in X, it doesn't mean you are naturally better/worse than Y ● Geography has more bearing on your biological traits than anything else ○ All the archaeological and genetic data point to abundant flows of individuals, ideas, and genes across continents, with modern humans evolving at the same time, together Race as genetics is bad science ● Race is a sociopolitical construction, but it has powerful effects on people (race is an invention but it's real) ○ The stereotypes given to each ‘race’ does not capture the complexity of the actual behaviour and lived experiences of the people ● It misses the larger societal cause underlying racial inequalities in health, wealth, and opportunity Effects of Racialization ● Have less access to medical care and food security ● Are subject to police violence and surveillance ● Experience greater social stress ● Suffer higher maternal mortality rates ● Struggle to get recognized in the healthcare system Franz Boas contributions to the study of culture

● Race is a construct that does not explain much about social relations or social changes ● Culture is relative ● Western civilization is not inherently better ● History and human progress are not linear The Rise of Eugenics ● European and American scientists build upon human classification systems about biological inferiority ● Eugenics → science should be used to racially purify a society which would mean making it better according to the logic of racial hierarchies ● Eugenist ideas are based on unscientific conclusions, not verifiable data ● Eugenist ideas are an inevitable outcome of human classification, it can not be supported; the idea of race as inherent by logic is dangerous The Natural Instability of Human Types ● The ability of races of humankind should not be seen as natural or hereditary; shaped by the environment ● Physical development is based on the environment ● Eugenics as a framework is based on a faulty premise ● Doesn’t completely reject the idea that there are separate races, but he doesn’t believe that such differences reflect any intrinsic biological differences ● Minimize the importance of race as a determinant of human behaviour ● Behaviour is determined by a range of variables → environment, social customs and rituals ● If behaviour is determined by a range of variables, then engineering a society based on the idea that certain people are biologically more inclined toward certain behaviours, makes no sense and is empirically incorrect W.E.B. Du Bois - Of Our Spiritual Strivings ● Du Bois work ○ Show that Black Americans are not incapable as the racial thoughts ○ Employs methods like intensive interviews, surveys, look at historical archives (combining qualitative and quantitative methods) ○ Break down generalizations denaturalize identities ○ Embrace cultural traditions, challenge assimilation ○ Black American experience double consciousness ○ Pan-African diasporic identity ● Soul → a consciousness; an awareness of self; something that makes us feel complete ○ Self-awareness is the double consciousness, that he is different from the others ● Double consciousness, color line, veil ○ The sense that he is Black and American, he sees it as incompatible ○ There is a veil/color line that separates the two identity ● The realization of one’s difference as Black and American ○ He suddenly sees himself as a racialized person, changing his view

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○ He looks at himself from others' perspective (the dominant group) ● A reflection on the experience of racialization (of Du Bois) ● A key quote → his cultural heritage is suppressed in order to assimilate with the white community ○ What does it mean to present yourself in a certain way to be accepted by the people of power? ○ Generational inequality shapes lived experience Kimberle Williams Crenshaw ● Second-wave feminism doesn’t fully advocate the rights of POC women ● The concept of intersectionality ○ Focuses on how the law responds to discrimination, which has tended to look at gender and race separately, leaving out Black and other women unable to get justice ma ○ DeGraffenreid vs General Motors → prior to 1964, black women were not employed by GM, seniority layoffs (the black women are laid off), the court didn’t see a problem because they employed women and black women, Crenshaw argued that the court ignored compound discrimination ○ Intersectionality is the lens to see how power comes and collides; everyone has their own unique experience of discrimination and privilege Gillian Creese - Unsettling the Great White North ● Chapter: creating spaces of belonging ○ Ethnographic, interviews, lived experience, emic approach, historical approach, lived experience of racialization, breaking down generalizations through select interviews

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Creese’s analysis of the New African community in Vancouver uses methods that are evident in ethnographic work. She uses an emic approach by doing interviews with the community and asking about their lived experiences. Moreover, she also approaches it historically by including the historical background of the communities. By doing so, people can understand the experiences through the narrative of the people from the Black community, hence breaking down the generalizations and stereotypes made towards them. Gillian Crease Takeaway ● Migration right is not an easy process ● Racialized migrations face different challenges ● To study racialization study both people's experiences in the present and the history of a place ● Ethnographic approach (brings present and historical approach)