ANTH 100 Week 2 Notes

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Oct 30, 2023

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ANTH 100 Week 2 Notes (Defining and Reimagining Culture) JANUARY 16 Three takes on culture ● Edward Burnett Tylor ○ Culture —> customs, languages, rituals, food, behaviours, etc ○ 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 ■ Rooted in secondary sources (travelogues, missionary booklets) ● Frank 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

○ Methods ■ Interact with people with cultures and ask them to describe ■ Combine with archaeological methods ● 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) ○ Asks what function different components of culture have ■ Functionalism ○ Neat holes ○ Have their own internal logic ○ Filtered through looking at a solely inter-island exchange and no historical perspective ○ Founder of functionalism —> components of a society serve a job, and together they make the society operate ○ Still kinda believes in 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 consumption, 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

The Kula ● Economic component of the larger culture of the Trobriand islands ● An inter-island system of exchange ○ 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 ● 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 ○ Magic

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JANUARY 18 Lila Abu-Lughod ● Ethnographic work based in Egypt with the Awlad ‘Alli Bedouin ● Media, politics, social life ● Role of liberal feminist 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) ○ Malinowski treats culture as a functional system ○ 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 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 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 ○ Can researchers entirely avoid it? ● 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, every woman wants the same things ● What can feminists do to change Self/Other Binary ○ Recognize how first and second-wave feminism reflects a very specific type of person’s experience ○ Take seriously the idea that different people living in different places in different periods of time want different things ○ Take the intersectionality (from third-wave feminism) framework to develop a more nuanced approach to a different culture A framework that allows us to understand how people experience privilege and discrimination ● Shaped by multiple identities

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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 ● Abu-Lughod → diasporic scholars share a connection when studying their own community ● 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-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

DISCUSSION NOTES ● The issue with culture is what defines it? ● What constitutes s culture is very vague ● It is ever-changing ● What makes a culture different from another one, the boundaries od culture is permeable and not particularly clearly defined ● It presents the community as acting the same way or doing the same things ● The problem with the term “culture” is that it tends to essentialize groups: it simplistically represents a particular group of people as a unified whole that share simple common values, ideas, practices, and beliefs. ● ● I think that culture is quite a vague term and when it is used, many people use it as a way to perceive and describe a certain community by how different they are to them. It can become a way of generalizing certain groups and creating stereotypes which can be dehumanizing. It groups people together and promotes th differences. However, I feel that culture is a concept that is always changing. Many cultures overlap with each other and influence each other over time, but because of the emphasis on difference, I think that it is hard to recognize it, especially when it has been the norm for a long time. Hence, I think that culture can create issues in uniting people and it makes people view other people as ‘other’.

TUTORIAL E.B. Taylor: evolutionary theory → cultural essentialism ● Secondary sources ● ‘Primitive society’ will progress to catch up Franz Boas: culture as a product of social relations and historical processes ● Observations, interactions, empiricism ● Kinda like natural sciences Malinowski: culture have their own internal logic, neat wholes ● Participant observation (etic) ● Functionalism Culture → shared and learnt knowledge that people use to generate behavior and interpret experiences Kula ● Circulation ● Beyond utility, have complex rule ● Value ● Status ● Relations ●

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23 JANUARY (continuation) 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