4: (Re)producing inequalities Flashcards
1)What can structuralism tell us about the material side of life
• We have to eat and drink to survive. There is a whole realm of material reproduction of life that structuralism maybe doesn’t tell us very much about, or doesn’t give us instruments to help us think about that very much.
Another thing that structuralism doesn’t really help us to grasp is if we stay a culture shares the same system of classification e.g. lele culture, then does that mean they all share it to the same degree?
• Does it mean that they are somehow all equal in that culture? Are therefore systems of classifications socially neutral, or do some people share them more than other people, and do they maybe work to the advantage of other people more than others. Some people have more to gain from certain ways of classifying and others have less.
What about inequalities within cultures? These people who share system of classification?
Another thing that structuralism doesn’t seem to grasp very well, is that if culture is transmitted as a set of classification from generation to generation, how does this actually happen? How do we learn this, transmit and reproduce?
How did they come about in the first place? How did they generate? And then transmitted over and over again. If they are taught and therefore learned, from generation to generation, then how does change ever happen? How can we then understand any change in history? Or when people start to classify in different ways, where does that come from? Structuralism doesn’t have much to say about historical development about change.
Structuralism also doesn’t really help us understand is that it talks cultures that are mainly separate ‘the lele culture’ the idea that it is a system of classification, you have to have a pretty good idea of whos in this culture. We have a problem of ‘discreetness’ –
- this idea that cultures are ‘neatly bounded’ – we know exactly who belongs to it and who doesn’t belong to it, they live through history as separate units in a mosaic. But in reality, ‘no culture is an island’. They are constantly in interaction with each other. This has historically always been the case. How can we understand these links to the rest of the world? How can we understand, rather than looking within a culture (like structuralism does), how can we look at the connects about all these ways of classifying in the world, to exist. Including unequal connections, such as colonial part of the world and center of the empire.
- Many of these questions that structuralism does not provide answers to, those questions are the exact questions that anthropology inspired by Marxism is trying to answer.
(re)producing inequalities
Some general traits of Marxist-inspired anthropology:
- A concern with material existence (production/reproduction)
- A concern with unequal power relations
- A concern with historical process (incl. change)
- A concern with global interconnections
- What can structuralism tell us about the material side of life
- Cultures can be implicated in matters of inequalities – when some people have more to gain in matters of classifying than others
- ‘no culture is an island’ they are constantly in contact with others
Sidney Mintz: Food and Its Relationship to Concepts of Power (KEY READING)
- She uses human dietary rules as a way to look inside a culture and see human interaction
- Marxist inspired anthropologists also use the topic of food as a window to look into broader questions about human societies.
- How people in Britain came to like sugar?
- In 18C became a very popular food stuff
- To explore that, you could do different things. You could do a structuralist analysis and try and look how sweet taste is being categories compared to sour taste. – you could learn interesting things about society and its taste for sugar. But that would be a structurlist analysis. It wouldn’t allow us to do the same thing as what Mintz is trying to do because Mintsz is interested in the place of sugar in human history and its link with power.
- He doesn’t start from saying ‘lets look at British culture and then in that British culture lets try and understand within that culture, like Douglas does. He doesn’t start from a bounded image of culture at all. Not culture is an island for Marxist anthropology.
- Instead of doing this he focuses of global interactions, concerned with historical process, material existence.
- In order to grasp this, he has to look at colonialism, because of the way sugar is produced, and the way it is traded, obviously colonialism has to become part of this culture.
- He explains how sugar over time became a globally traded commodity.
- Argues that this idea of ‘sweetness’ developed as a essential dimension of all these historical developments. Sweetness played a crucial role in this. He presents a summary of this in his text.
• He starts from a paradox: He says ‘on the one hand, food preferences (sweetness) are extremely persistent. They change very slowly across history. There are certain parts of the world where people have taste for certain types of food and this will change very very slowly over time (globalisation, colonialism etc). On the other hand he says (this is the paradox), there are historical cases of drastic changes , where people over a really short time develop a taste for something. E.g. The case of coca cola in the US then globally, shows how there were certain large scale processes that made this possible and which sort of drove that process.
He is saying that such things like certain tastes for food, something that is seemingly individual, in fact obviously a ‘social construction’ and its not an individual thing. We learn how to like certain things . That means that this also involves power relations, because if we learn something, we learn it in a certain bigger context. We are some how embedded in power relations
